Now that only the over-seventies can recall the half-century of semi-neglect which followed the world premiere of the Eighth, paradoxically Mahler’s biggest success in his lifetime, the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances have become so frequent than it can be difficult to recapture the excitement they once engendered. It was Henry Wood who introduced the work to these shores and a later rendition of February 1938 was attended by the young Benjamin Britten who wrote in his diary: ‘Execrable performance (under H. Wood) – but even then the work made a tremendous impression. I was physically exhausted at the end – & furious with the lack of understanding all around.’ The post-War bunker of the Royal Festival Hall is not the most obvious setting for it, yet the LPO has enjoyed a special relationship with the score in this venue since Klaus Tennstedt led a notably inspired rendition in 1991. Vladimir Jurowski followed suit in 2017, another epic featuring some 700 performers not to mention a redundant interval. Tonight, we had maybe 500 and no such hiatus but there were other distractions.
Just getting all the participants somewhere near the stage poses problems enough one might have thought. Choral forces were seated in the main body of the side stalls as well as behind the stage, the soloist for Part One lining up between the children’s choir and the orchestra. But the South Bank Centre had upped the ante by including the concert in its ‘Multitudes’ series. These ‘enhanced’ events are designed to attract new audiences to the joys of classical music by mixing it up with circus, grime, poetry and film. Perhaps the aim is to find attendees in the cul de sac of drop-in social space that the RFH foyers have lately become. The sequence opened with a largely successful Ravel makeover. But Mahler’s Eighth was never intended as a dramatico-musical entity (though Part Two can sound like it). Was there a point to it all? Might that old sense of gala return?
In Part One the designer interventions were harmless enough: brighter lighting on the performers in a darkened hall and three zones adjacent to the RFH organ console festooned with video screens. Tal Rosner’s gently morphing images suggested variously the natural world and the night sky with the occasional hint of a face or alien planet. The text was conspicuously absent beyond vague sectional headings.
Part Two featured more video work including ‘yer actual Faust’, as Alf Garnett might have said, both on screen and in the hall where the spotlit silent actor, now made flesh, accompanied Gretchen into the stalls. Singers had to memorize their parts, being obliged to pop up in expected places. The revelation of the Mater Gloriosa poking out from between the loftiest organ pipes struck me as vaguely comical. Other soloists gesticulated more or less enthusiastically at ground level. The team was vocally strong, but Andrew Staples excelled as Doctor Marianus, liberating Mahler’s difficult writing from the usual stresses and strains. Most impressive of all was the choral singing, expertly drilled, with members of the London Symphony Chorus participating along with the London Philharmonic Choir in antiphonal formation. Placed centrally, the Tiffin Boys’ Choir supplied especially gutsy, spirited, focused tone.
Gardner programmed the work for the first time last year in his farewell Bergan concert but has been associated with choral and vocal excellence throughout his career. In London his ‘interpretation’ contained few surprises and no overwrought psychodrama. Directing with his customary efficiency, he favoured a Solti-esque choppiness in the vigorous episodes while unafraid to embrace a certain sentimentality in sweeter, operatically styled interludes. He was always very much in control. Tennstedt’s massive (unmarked) ritardando into the recapitulation of the Veni, Creator Spiritus was eschewed in favour of a last-minute rhetorical slowing. The sound was objectively speaking too crisp and dry for transcendence, but clarity and heft brought their own rewards. At the very end the extra brass were situated in a pair of upper boxes facing each other across the stalls, the denouement thrillingly extrovert whatever the intended dramatic gloss. That one so often forgot to look at the video work and associated shenanigans was not only a tribute to the musical quality of this realisation but also, perhaps, confirmation of the all-encompassing nature of Mahler’s own vision.
The post LPO – Edward Gardener – Mahler – Symphony No. 8 @ Royal Festival Hall appeared first on The Classical Source.
