I was back at the Royal Festival Hall on May 28th for another programme combining Berg and Mahler, in this case the Violin Concerto (with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist) and the Sixth Symphony, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
I last heard the concerto in a Proms performance some time ago, but the Royal Albert Hall acoustic tends to blur the detail – now I could hear it all in the much drier ambience of the RFH, along with the corrections which have now been made to the score. The interpretation was at the more restrained end of the spectrum, and was really all I could have wished for.
I wondered what my reaction to Mahler 6 would be. This particular symphony seems very much in favour at the moment – even my local university orchestra has been playing it – and my usual reaction to it is to wish I were listening to Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces instead. Would I still have the same reaction at this concert? I did, and after the very subtle orchestral colours that I’d just heard in Berg’s music the Mahler seemed garish by comparison. Perhaps a visual counterpart of this was what happened to the harpist. In the concerto the harp was unusually positioned directly in front of the conductor, in the middle of the strings; in the symphony the harps (now two) were in their usual location between violins and percussion.
I should add that my comparison is a comment on the work, not so much on the interpretation. I was probably in a small minority in not having come mainly to hear the Mahler (though my neighbour appeared to fall asleep in the final(!) movement of it). Like some others, I was also unconvinced by the slow movement being played third. (In general I think that Mahler’s second thoughts tend to be improvements). It seemed to make the first part of the symphony too relentless.
This symphony is also famously the one with cowbells in, and I believe the first work to make use of them. Did Mahler borrow some cowbells off a local farmer to add to his array of percussion? And is there now a standard orchestral cowbell? I noticed that one of the horn players had his own call afterwards – presumably this was the one who changed the chord from major to minor in the ‘motto’ theme (a bit like singing second soprano in Stanford’s Beati quorum via).
The concert was reviewed in the Guardian, Times and Sunday Times. Also in The Classical Source, a site new to me. At the time of writing it is still available on BBC Radio 3’s Listen Again.