Tag Archives: Gustav Mahler

On Record – MahlerFest XXXV: Kenneth Woods conducts Symphony no.3 & Gunning Symphony no.10

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Stacey Rishoi (mezzo-soprano), Boulder Children’s Chorale, Women of Boulder Concert Chorale, Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Gunning Symphony no.10 (2016-17) [First public performance]
Mahler Symphony no.3 in D minor (1893-6)

Colorado MahlerFest 195269164287 [two discs, 114’21”]
Live performances on 22 May 2022, Macky Auditorium, Boulder, Colorado

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

The 35th Colorado MahlerFest, the eighth under the direction of Kenneth Woods, reached its culmination with the performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony and preceded in this concert with a first public hearing for the 10th Symphony by the late-lamented Christopher Gunning.

What’s the music like?

In its setting out the creation of the world, from an inanimate state to the dawn of humanity, Mahler’s Third Symphony is his most ambitious conceptually and certainly his lengthiest. It is to Woods’s credit that, though his account at 92 minutes is among the swiftest, there is no sense of haste – not least his handling of the first movement’s vastly extended sonata design, which amply conveys the burgeoning of natural forces with unbridled impetus but equally a fantasy or even playfulness manifest through the irresistible abandon of those closing pages.

Those having watched the online broadcast will recall Woods observing the customary break before the remaining five movements which constitute the second part. Here, though, there is barely a pause going into the second movement, its minuet-like lilt and evocation of all things vernal rarely having sounded so delicate or ingratiating. The ensuing scherzo is almost as fine, the often boisterous irony of its outer sections finding contrast in trios whose post-horn solos are ethereally rendered by Richard Adams, with a frisson of danger emerging in the final bars.

Nor is Stacey Rishoi found wanting in a Nietzsche setting that alternates earnest speculation with heartfelt yearning. She is no less inside its successor’s setting of a Knaben Wunderhorn text, its ambivalence offset by a whimsical response from the women’s and children’s choirs. Others may have found even more profundity from the finale, but Woods ensures it emerges as a seamless totality – the anguish at its centre drawn into a rapt eloquence which is carried through to a coda bringing this disciplined and persuasive performance to its ecstatic close.

Unlike other of his peers, their concert output little more than a rehash of their work for film and television, Christopher Gunning’s symphonies and concertos seem abstract music with a vengeance. The single-movement 10th Symphony is both cohesive in its structure and methodical in its evolution. Woods has recorded it with BBC National Orchestral of Wales (Signum Classics), and while that studio recording has greater formal focus, the Colorado musicians unfold this quixotic score to its serene ending with demonstrably greater spontaneity and impulsiveness.

Does it all work?

Almost always. Those who prefer a more expansive or interventionist approach in the Mahler may be disappointed, but the no-nonsense nature of Woods’s traversal conveys any amount of insight or expressive nuance. Presentation is equally straightforward, but Mahler’s expression markings for each movement should have been included alongside those descriptive headings he later deleted, while the Gunning might have been best placed at the start (as in the concert) with the first part of the Mahler – allowing its second part to unfold as an unbroken continuity.

Is it recommended?

Very much. Boulder’s Macky Auditorium might not have the most spacious perspective, but its clarity and definition audibly benefit a performance that is much more than the memento of an occasion. Indeed, this MahlerFest series is shaping up to be a memorable Mahler cycle.

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For further purchase options, visit the MahlerFest website – and for more information on the festival itself, click here. Click on the names for further information on conductor Kenneth Woods and composer Christopher Gunning

BBC Proms 2023 – Leila Josefowicz, BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo – Berg & Mahler

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Prom 35 – Leila Josefowicz (violin), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo

Berg Violin Concerto (1935)
Mahler Symphony no.7 (1904-5)

Royal Albert Hall, London
Thursday 10 August 2023

by Richard Whitehouse photos by Chris Christodoulou / BBC

The late indisposition of Sir Andrew Davis saw Sakari Oramo at the helm for this programme of Berg and Mahler, an effective coupling even allowing for the replacement of the latter’s Tenth Symphony with his Seventh. Hopefully it will be ‘third time lucky’ for Davis and Mahler 10.

It might have received almost 20 hearings at these concerts, but Berg’s Violin Concerto is not easy to bring off in so resonant an acoustic as the Albert Hall’s. As elegantly as she delineated the initial Andante’s arch-like trajectory, Leila Josefowicz did struggle to make herself heard against a restrained though dense orchestral backdrop. Balance righted itself with the ensuing Allegretto – the soloist’s ingratiating response ideal for its alluring, even coy expression with a bittersweet folksong inflections then its ominous foreshadowing of the work’s second part.

It was in that latter half’s Allegro the performance really took flight, Josefowicz as attuned to its fractious opening pages as to the plangent searching of its cadenza-like central span. Both the seismic start of the movement’s culmination and its convulsive wind-down were assuredly handled – the emergence of Bach’s Es ist genug chorale setting the course for a final Adagio where pensive inwardness and heartfelt supplication were palpably conveyed through to the fervent climax, then a close bringing matters full circle with its mood of beatific resignation.

Unheard at the Proms until 1969, Mahler’s Seventh was also the last of his symphonies to win wider acceptance and is still a tough challenge to make cohere. Oramo (above) had its measure though not consistently in an opening movement, the effortfulness of whose introduction pervades its main Allegro yet without impeding its onward and increasingly cumulative course. For all the wonderment of its central interlude then emotional heft of the lead-in to the reprise, there was yet a sense of this music being coerced into shape rather than unfolding with due inevitability. Not so the ‘First Night Music’, its intertwining of the speculative and crepuscular rendered to bewitching effect – Oramo balancing those intricate yet translucent textures with a sure sense of where this movement was headed, namely a resolution not so much tentative as intangible.

Equally elusive, the central Scherzo can seem an exercise in flitting gestures as fail to add up to anything more substantial but here exuded darkly ironic humour as it wended its unsettling way. The ‘shadowy’ duly found its ideal complement in the ‘amorous’ manner of the ‘Second Night Music’ – its underlying affability all too easy to make bland or faceless, yet which here unfolded with a precise feel for its function within Mahler’s teasingly oblique formal scheme. As was almost equally true of the Rondo-Finale – its ordinario marking easy to misinterpret, but in which Oramo’s sure and steadfast if never turgid course made the most of its engaging progress. Hardly alone in not quite making the reappearance of first-movement material feel other than contrived, he nevertheless headed through those final pages with irresistible verve.

This performance would not have been as successful overall without its sterling contribution by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, both in soloistic passages or those tuttis as give the outer movements their impact. Ten years on, the rapport between orchestra and conductor remains undimmed.

For more on the 2023 BBC Proms, visit the festival’s website at the BBC. Meanwhile click on the names for more information on artists Leila Josefowicz, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Sakari Oramo

In concert – CBSO / Robert Treviño – Mahler’s 10th symphony

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Robert Treviño

Mahler, ed. Cooke Symphony no.10 in F sharp major (1910)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 18 May 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has a notable association with Mahler’s Tenth Symphony – realized by Deryck Cooke – having given memorable performances with Simon Rattle and more recently with Sakari Oramo. This evening’s account was to have been taken by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, but her indisposition brought American conductor Robert Treviño to the helm for what was a memorable performance that vindicated (if such were needed) this ‘performing edition’ and hinted at what might develop into a notable partnership in the future.

The quality of string playing these days means the initial viola melody no longer poses quite the risks it once did. Treviño went on to shape this opening Adagio with a sure sense of how its contrasting themes are drawn into an evolution whose unpredictability is informed by an emotional candour, heard at its most explicit in the climactic dissonance (evidently added at a late stage) such as makes the beatific coda the more affecting. Nor did he fail to tease out the underlying continuity of music shot through with the knowledge of its own dissolution.

Such an issue is more graphically present in the first Scherzo, its contrapuntal texture fitfully realized in the score but here achieved with a deftness making the trade-off between its polka- and ländler-like ideas the more potent. Not least during the later stages of a movement where these themes alternate with ever increasing frequency, as if in a stretto of activity, on the way to the most decisive and even affirmative conclusion found in Mahler’s late music. Treviño’s opting not to tone down those more unlikely percussive touches proved its own justification.

Almost Mahler’s shortest symphonic movement, the Purgatorio is yet crucial to the overall design – the ‘treadmill’ motion of its outer sections exuding acute irony, with the histrionics at its centre firmly held in check so their implications were made more than usually evident.

Performances of this work most often founder in the second Scherzo, but not here – Treviño launching it with anguished intent, while maintaining a persuasive balance between this and the more consoling element which informs its progress. The brief central interlude conveyed exquisite pathos, tension barely receding as the expression gradually and inevitably subsides into crepuscular activity with its fleeting intimations of what went before and what is still to come. Just one bass-drum stroke, surely, is needed to separate this movement from the finale.

That said, the unfolding of this latter left nothing to chance – whether in the sepulchral gloom of its initial bars, the poise of its indelible melody for flute, or a central phase of activity that here emerged as the natural consequence of what went before. Treviño (rightly) retained the additional percussion necessary to make the return of the first movement’s climax the more shattering – the sheer eloquence of what followed building to a rapturous culmination which, as with the closing emotional wrench, drew an unfaltering response from the CBSO strings.

A memorable performance, and one that met with an enthusiastic response. Treviño brought the soloists and sections to their feet, but might have started with trumpeter Jason Lewis and flautist Marie-Christine Zupancic – their contributions typifying the excellence of the whole.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. For more on Robert Trevino, visit his website

In concert – Jennifer Johnston, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko – The Divine Poem

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Jennifer Johnston (soprano, above), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (below)

Deutsch Phantasma (2022) [RLPO co-commission: UK premiere]
Mahler Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1884-5)
Scriabin Symphony no.3 in C minor Op.43 ‘The Divine Poem’ (1902-4)

Philharmonic Hall, London
Thursday 4 May 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

He may now be the orchestra’s conductor laureate, but the 15-year partnership between Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was always tangible in this evening’s concert – its refreshingly different programme summoning the best from both orchestra and conductor.

Co-commissioning music by Bernd Richard Deutsch was an astute move – the Vienna-based composer now in his mid-40s and among the leading composers of his generation. Taking its cue from the Beethoven Frieze which Gustav Klimt devised for the 14th Vienna Secessionist Exhibition in 1902, this 15-minute piece takes a pointedly dialectical route as it evolves from the fractured uncertainty of yearning and suffering, via the cumulative intensity of a struggle against hostile forces, to the attainment of happiness through poetic creation. To what degree this might be a commentary on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (as embodied in the three parts of Klimt’s opus) is uncertain, but the motivic ingenuity and orchestral virtuosity of Deutsch’s response can hardly be doubted – not least in a performance as assured and committed as this.

If the indisposition of Adela Zaharia meant the regrettable omission of Strauss’s rarely heard Brentano-Lieder from tonight’s concert (though Petrenko has scheduled them with the Royal Philharmonic next season), hearing Jennifer Johnston in Mahler’s Gesellen-Lieder was by no means a hardship. The four songs, to the composer’s own texts, comprise an overview of his preoccupations (creative and otherwise) in his mid-20s with numerous anticipations of what became his First Symphony. Outlining a delicate interplay of pensiveness and wistfulness in the initial song, Johnston was no less attentive to its successor’s mingling of innocence with experience, and if the surging histrionics of the third song bordered on the melodramatic, the fatalistic procession of the final number felt the more affecting for its restrained eloquence.

Petrenko (above) set down a highly regarded cycle of Scriabin Symphonies over his tenure with the Oslo Philharmonic, and if the RLPO lacked any of that orchestra’s fastidious poise, the sheer verve and energy of its playing more then compensated. Not least in an opening movement whose unfolding can seem longer on ambition than attainment, but which was held together with unforced conviction – the most often prolix development duly emerging with a tautness to make it more than usually emblematic of this work’s metaphysical Struggles as a whole.

Outwardly more compact, the remaining movements require astute and cumulative handling such as these received here. The alternately enchanting and ominous Delights melded into an enfolding yet never amorphous entity, out of which the more animated motion of Divine Play gradually brought together earlier ideas on its way to an apotheosis whose amalgam of the work’s principal themes yielded grandiloquence without undue bathos. Scriabin’s cosmic aspirations thereby seemed the more ‘real’ for being the expression of purely musical forces. An expanded RLPO (its nine horns arrayed across the upper tier of the platform) was heard to advantage in the ambience of Philharmonic Hall, contributions by trumpeter Richard Cowen and leader Thelma Handy enhancing what was an authoritative and memorable performance.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra website. Click on the artist names for more on Jennifer Johnston and conductor Vasily Petrenko, and for more on composer Bernd Richard Deutsch – who also has a dedicated page at his publisher Boosey

In concert – Strings of the CBSO / Eugene Tzikindelean: Four Seasons

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Strings of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Eugene Tzikindelean (above)

Schubert arr. Mahler String Quartet no.14 in D minor D810 ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (1824, arr. 1896)
Vivaldi Le quattro Stagioni Op.8 nos. 1-4 (1718-20)
Piazzolla arr. Desyatnikov Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (1965-9, arr. 1996-8)

Town Hall, Birmingham
Saturday 22 April 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Acoustically transformed following its refurbishment some 15 years ago, a commendably full Town Hall proved to be the ideal venue for this judiciously balanced programme featuring the strings of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with its leader Eugene Tzikindelean.

Mahler never fully completed his arrangement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, but this has enjoyed not a few hearings since its realization by David Matthews with Donald Mitchell four decades ago. Tzikindelean presided over a brisk, incisive opening Allegro (its exposition-repeat not unreasonably omitted), and if the 30-strong ensemble had not quite the tonal depth or dynamic range that Mahler likely envisaged, there was no lack of immediacy – at least until momentum faltered slightly in the later stages of the reprise then into the coda.

No such uncertainty affected the Andante (the only movement elaborated by Mahler), whose variations on Schubert’s earlier song exuded a cumulative intensity up to the theme’s soulful reappearance toward the close. Nor did the Scherzo lack for truculence over its brief yet vital course, assuaged by the trio’s wistful elegance, while the final Presto unfolded as a tarantella as agile as it was malevolent. Tzikindelean kept his players on a tight if never inflexible rein through to a coda that brought this (for the most part) powerful reading to its decisive close.

Tzikindelean having vacated the leader’s chair for centre-stage, the second half consisted of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons interspersed with Astor Piazzolla’s take on the seasons from the perspective of Buenos Aires. Brought together a quarter-century ago (at the behest of Gidon Kremer for his group Kremerata Baltica) by Leonid Desyatnikov, with numerous references to the Baroque master, the outcome is a provocative amalgam between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ which the CBSO strings rendered with alacrity. Among the highlights from the Vivaldi might be mentioned the plaintive eloquence of the Largo from Spring, the coursing impetus of the Presto from Summer, alternation of the robust and poetic in the initial Allegro of Autumn, or that discreetly alluring interplay of legato and pizzicato writing in the Largo from Winter.

Heard in the sequence ‘Summer-Autumn-Winter-Spring’, the tangos by Piazzolla offer any number of anticipations whether melodic or textural. A significant feature of Desyatnikov’s arrangement is the prominence accorded to the leaders from each section which were seized upon gratefully – not least by cellist Eduardo Vassallo, whose Piazzolla recordings with his ensemble El Ultimo Tango are a masterclass in performance from the chamber perspective. While each of the present pieces is more than the sum of its parts, surely the most arresting instance is that towards the close of ‘Spring’ when the harpsichord (ably taken by Masumi Yamamoto) emerges with an allusion to Vivaldi’s opening theme – a coup de théâtre that is seldom less than spellbinding, and duly worked its magic as part of tonight’s performance.

An impressive showing, then, for the CBSO strings and Tzikindelean – who will hopefully be making further appearances both as soloist and director in the coming season. Certainly, the repertoire for string orchestra is one whose exploration should prove well worthwhile.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. You can read more about Eugene Tzikindelean here, and more about El Ultimo Tango here