UMBERTO’S MAHLER
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centrre
Saturday February 24, 2024
Umberto Clerici
I was fully intending to go to this matinee performance, if only for the purposes of re-acquainting myself physically with the QSO personnel and character after many years of absence. But a bout of COVID (my first) interfered with these optimistic plans and, if you’re getting on for senior status, you move into any public space with caution. So, thanks to the Australian Digital Concert Hall, which broadcast the second of two Mahler 7 readings on offer, I managed to get through the experience in extreme comfort; more so than taking the trip into the capital and negotiating the architectural brutalism that houses many of this orchestra’s events.
Last year, Umberto Clerici directed his musicians in the Mahler Symphony No. 6 and seemed to think that its successor presented listeners with a more substantial challenge. Well, it could be so if your diet is Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; but the joy connected with this composer is that intellectual depth is not his forte. If you like, you can take in all of the symphonies as instrumental (sometimes vocal) feasts and not worry about anything else; looking for the eternal verities is as useless an exercise as it is when engaging with Strauss’s more pretentious tone-poems.
There was a time, as many of us remember, when a Mahler symphony meant a packed house; not just for the first and second or the fourth, but even big, purely orchestral frameworks like this No. 7. Such a phenomenon was in part due to the rarity of live performances, the composer not yet reaching the status of programmatic cliche and his scores still hefty struggles for even the best local players. The recent Maestro film culminates in an Ely Cathedral display of Bernstein/Bradley Cooper conducting the Mahler Resurrection No. 2 finale with massive freneticism from the podium, no matter what was happening around it. And there’s no doubt that a finely calculated interpretation of the complete score can rivet your attention like little other music – from start to end.
Mind you, this delight at experiencing live experience arose in me because a performance of any of these symphonies came like a bolt from the blue; even Iwaki’s early reading of No. 2 was a one-off revelation in 1970s Melbourne, Still, such a work’s sheen has worn after the complete Mahler cycles in that city of Markus Stenz (he presented it twice during his reign, I think) and Sir Andrew Davis (almost a complete cycle), not to mention Simone Young’s recent over-hyped production to celebrate the re-opening of the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall. The work might even have come to take the place of Beethoven’s 9th as far as a musical motif for popular celebrations, if it weren’t for the long build-up to the choral finale; not to mention the descent into textual incoherence after the composer has finished with Klopstock.
On this afternoon, seven-and-a-half minutes after the starting time, one of the double basses, Justin Bullock, took a microphone in hand and gave us an amiable welcome full of pretty gauche, if well-intentioned matter. Mind you, he did provide some information that I couldn’t find in the program: the names of the guitarist (Jeremy Stafford) and mandolinist (Joel Woods). Thanks a lot, but I’m still in the dark about the second harpist, the fourth trumpet, some of the horns, and other supernumeraries like the extra double bass and some percussionists. Not to tell the QSO its business but these people deserve printed recognition, and space should be found for them in program notes, especially when a page is wasted on a guide for the young! Which parent or school would be misguided enough to expect a pre-adolescent to sit through this mammoth composition?
Then we had a general tuning 12 minutes in, before Clerici arrived and also gave us the benefit of his insights. Much of this struck me as a preparation for mystification, as though Mahler is still a musical wizard yet hard to fathom. From the first, I’ve found it hard to go along with this concept of ‘difficult’ Mahler: hard to listen to, hard to interpret, problem-laden all the way. Suffice to say that in my view these symphonies are dream-jobs for conductors. You have to marshal your forces and exercise a degree of dynamic balance, but they can play themselves (as evident from Gilbert Kaplan’s readings of the Symphony No. 2 worldwide). Further, I’d suggest that interpretation is largely inbuilt, thanks to the composer’s specificity of scoring. Especially in this Symphony No. 7, Mahler’s detailed directions make it easy for an observant musician to achieve a result, the only variables dependent on the individual or group timbres of the orchestra, e.g. the quadruple/quintuple woodwind choirs.
At all events, I found it difficult to swallow Clerici’s populist description of Mahler’s music in this work as ‘mad’ or ‘cuckoo’. Such epithets might have struck sympathy with the Berlin, Liege and Viennese audiences at the symphony’s first performances, but come on: these took place about 125 years ago and even Brisbane has moved a long way forward since, to the extent that local listeners don’t have to be patronised with such simplistic characterizations. Even at his most frantic, Mahler is in complete command of what he is expressing and how he does so. The only dislodgement of sensibilities comes with his change of atmosphere, at which he is a master (if occasionally long-winded).
Anyway, we enjoyed our first downbeat on the Langsam-Allegro about 20 minutes after the scheduled start. Those opening tattoos impressed for their congruity but by bar 14’s climax the combined effort seemed lethargic, as though the musicians were recovering energy from the previous night’s run-through of the work. Matters improved by bar 19’s Etwas weniger langsam which is a less compelling point in the narrative but here impressed for its decisiveness. Further down the track, the upper strings lacked crispness at their multi-stopped chords in bar 58 and beyond; but you could be taken aback by their dynamic discipline when sweeping their way through the diaeresis at bar 128.
At about this point, it struck me (slow off the mark, as usual) that the violin groups were underpowered. You could see the players following their scores, headed with enthusiasm by concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto, but few of them were as involved in the task or, for that matter, putting themselves and their instruments under a similar pressure as exercised by their leader. Time and again, the powerful climaxes lacked sufficient bite so that points like the fortissimo to piano leap at bars 248 to 249 were over-reliant for their incisiveness on the piccolo+flutes doubling. By contrast, the brass choir proved to be well on top of their demands, solo or collegial, with no obvious broken notes.
But the reading was occasionally marred by obvious discrepancies, like a late flute entry at bar 305; actually, more of a miscalculation than an error here. Which you have to balance against the excellent collapse into gloom at the Adagio resumption of bar 338. But then you can’t ignore the weak string output at a wrenching point like the Fliessend of bar 499 with a solid clarinet reinforcement. And so it continued through this lengthy first movement with moments of accomplishment weighted against sudden lapses in either technique or individual insight.
The first Nachtmusik surged into flight with a splendid collapse across bars 28-9 that presented as deftly accomplished, as did some character-filled playing from contrabassoon and basses at bar 48’s Nicht eilen, from which point we were immersed in a real Mahler sound-world for some time with a satisfying weighting of activity, thanks to Clerici’s management. Later, I was very taken with the jubilant return to Nachtwacht-land at bars 222-3 and eventually satiated by the composer’s Come-to-the-cookhouse-door calls (reminiscent of the Symphony No. 1) emerging into prominence at bar 245 from the trumpets and haunting the landscape from that point on. Impressive also was the bassoon ensemble’s coherence a little after the Sehr gemessen of bar 295. Finally, one of the few woodwind problems I came across in these pages was a note-swallow from the clarinet at bar 228.
Proceeding to the mid-point Scherzo, the QSO’s attack sounded secure enough from all quarters, the strings getting the macabre waltz under way successfully, with only a passing blip of intonational unhappiness at the Straussian leaps across bars 68-72 to distract from a cogent bout of playing. Still, the Trio presented as a lucid delight, only the pesante chords at bar 243 momentarily off-kilter.
As if to disprove the complaint and reservation I had/made about the lack of body in the upper strings, the second Nachtmusik was enriched by a persuasive generosity of timbre from the first violins at bars 27-8 and on to bar 35. Both guitar and mandolin continued audible across this movement’s admittedly placid expanse, but their colours had been deftly inserted by this master who reached his pointillist apogee in Das Lied von der Erde four years after this symphony. The exposed oboe and harp at bar 256 proved slightly discrepant but the movement’s conclusion from about bar 372 was irresistible in its restraint: the ideal aural realization of a disappointed serenade.
I have to confess that, a little way into the Rondo-Finale, the score was set aside, chiefly because of previous experience where you can either get increasingly frustrated and angry, or you can simply bob along with the flow. Of course, there are moments that are a sheer delight, like the Elgarian swagger that kicks off in bar 23, while certain interludes weave an optimism-generating magic away from the tuckets and the trumpets. But this large canvas works as a patchy construct where Mahler achieves a sort of musical coitus interruptus, leading you on and then letting you down – or, if you like, taking you into sudden oases that are a break from tension but essentially enervating.
Perhaps the players were relieved to be on the home stretch; certainly, the enthusiasm with which they weltered out climactic points like bars 193-6 proved remarkable, especially as they were in the middle of this composer’s push-me-pull-you complex of jollification. Of course, the great advantage of holding fire and delaying the final crunch is that you heighten the general relief that breaks out after the final Drangend six bars.
As I’ve observed before, Mahler symphonies’ audiences tend to break out into standing ovations after the last bar. This could be due either to heartfelt enthusiasm for a great composer, or as a salute to the performers’ stamina. Or it might be just a general desire to get up after 90-to-100 minutes of sitting down. Whatever the case, people in the front stalls of the Concert Hall were obviously enthusiastic after Clerici’s final downbeat and the acclaim persisted long enough for the conductor to acknowledge plenty of individuals and groups among his forces. To be sure, the interpretation was on-and-off gripping, sometimes powerfully pointed. That it maintained your attention throughout was a creditable achievement. Yet, as an entity, the work remained on a competent level, rather than an exercise that moved the spirit.
But it did reinforce the point that I made earlier about Mahler’s approachability. You are faced here by a music of great power and a startlingly honest emotional range, if not depth. The composer’s personality is immediately perceptible and approachable and nothing he writes stands in the way of comprehension or is couched in obscurity; that came later, through his Second Viennese School admirers. If you have even a basic knowledge of the progress of 20th century serious music, Mahler is an open book who stands in no need of simplifications or exaggerations.
O'Connell the Music 