Jurowski conducts a novel Mahler 10 with the LPO at the RFH

Mostly with Mahler the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances, even those of the unfinished Tenth, have become so frequent than it can be difficult to recapture the excitement they once engendered. Tweaked or un-tweaked, Deryck Cooke’s performing version of Mahler’s five-movement torso has lately looked set to overtake freestanding renditions of the Adagio Mahler came closest to finishing. In this context Vladimir Jurowski’s decision to complete his personal (broadly chronological) Mahler odyssey with a rival edition byRudolf Barshai was a salutary reminder that there can be no definitive solutions. The Tenth is a ‘work in progress’. The maestro had every right to innovate and there was abundant applause at the close as he lifted the score aloft.

Part of our fascination with the Tenth lies in the way its extreme emotive force, apparently attributable to Mahler’s discovery of his wife’s affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, provokes a rip in the fabric of diatonic harmony with something of the iconic significance of the gaping mouth of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. The musical argument twice explodes into a dissonant pile-up which composer Boris Tishchenko called ‘the most terrifying chord in the whole history of music.’ While there may be other candidates, it is a key part of Barshai’s vision that such moments be given the additional power they might have acquired in a properly finalized composition. Cooke insisted that wasn’t his job.

Barshai’s own recording with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, captured in live concert the day after 9/11, has a generally opulent, string-dominated sound. It can be difficult to guess whether the fuller textures there are a consequence of the doublings he puts into the score, his own ‘Russian’ interpretative tendencies or the fact that youth orchestras tend to involve a larger than usual cohort of musicians. Jurowski had not directed this work in London (if anywhere) before tonight but we associate his Mahler with clean textures and a certain technocratic rigidity. The results seemed bound to intrigue.

In the event the opening line, perilously allocated by Mahler to the violas (here seated centre-stage with violins antiphonally placed), was cool and elegant rather than especially atmospheric. Marked pp, it was more like mf on this occasion which may or may not have been a strategic response to the failure of LPO audiences to settle and concentrate. Coughing did indeed prove to be a problem throughout, even during the finale’s glorious flute solo. In the Adagio’s more mobile episodes it was apparent that Barshai’s filling-in-the-blanks approach applied here too. That famous chord acquired additional brass to add ballast and high woodwind to provide an aptly shrieky onomatopoeic edge. Barshai was probably right to perceive even parts of this ‘complete’ movement as the harmonic frame over which Mahler would have stretched more complex contrapuntal detail. Jurowski was content to secure superb playing though not much more. There followed a general pause with the conductor sitting on a piano stool.

In the second and fourth movements the radical revoicings seemed dodgier, as if aspiring to a big-boned style Mahler himself was arguably intent on abandoning. The Rondo-Burleske of the Ninth was presumably the inspiration behind Barshai’s fuller, driven textures but why so much ‘Turkish’ clatter? Hindemith and even Bernstein kept springing to mind given the capricious selection of noise-makers – triangle, phones and spiels to the fore in the first scherzo, guitar obtruding during the trio. The very clarity of Jurowski’s direction magnified rather than resolved the doubts. If Cooke’s attenuated sound world is more reminiscent of Das Lied von der Erde (which sometimes doesn’t work in a scherzo whether rustic or urban), moments like the second scherzo’s A tempo aber sehr ruhig episode (from bar 291), achingly beautiful as realised by Sir Simon Rattle, went for nothing because they’re no longer there. Jurowski did however inject some swing and humour into the music’s stop-go antics.

The transition to the finale was accomplished with offstage drum strokes, an imaginative conceit on someone’s part, presumably representing the kind of sound that might have been heard from the Mahlers’ eleventh-floor New York window. But why so little sense of catharsis and the curious lack of dynamic range later on? It was no doubt Barshai’s score that dictated something louder than one is used to, tending to blunt the sense of homecoming and resolution. Hard too not to conclude that Jurowski’s characteristic avoidance of sentimentality was partly to blame. The brass, hitherto on top form, began to tire. And then with the strings’ ecstatic vault through nearly two octaves and some evocatively distanced horn calls it was all over.

The stage was crowded and the microphones were out in force. If there is to be a commercial recording it will have to be patched.