Gloomy Mahler (2) – Kindertotenlieder

The Bath Philharmonia and Jason Thornton brought Mahler back to St Swithin’s Church. For the conductor, Jason Thornton, this marked the point at which he had conducted all of Mahler’s orchestral works

We had Mahler’s orchestration for strings of the first movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. It’s hard to see quite what Mahler had to add or rearrange, apart from finding something for the double basses to do (they doubled the cellos from time to time and added reinforcing pizzicatos).

This was followed by a sensitive performance of Kindertotenlieder (in the chamber arrangement by Rainer Riehn) given by Gavin Carr. In the orchestra, I was particularly impressed by the woodwind playing. The second half Gavin was joined by Gemma Roper as soloists in Fauré’s Requiem with Cantilena (the local authority youth choir). A good preparation for my singing the piece myself in November; it was hard to imagine that the choir rarely sang with an orchestra.

The concert was well attended (a good audience of parents etc. is more or less guaranteed when you have a lot of young people performing). I sat in the side gallery, where the sideways view of the performers is blocked by pillars; one member of the audience stood up throughout in order to see them. Not for the first time, I wondered why the audience couldn’t use the West part of the gallery, which has no such impeded view. In fact some relatives of one of the soloists were seated there, so what was the reason for excluding others in the audience? I also reflected rather sadly on the absence of an organ in this church – you can see the space where it used to be.

This entry was posted in going to concerts and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.