Mahler Seven by the Tonhalle Zurich under Paavo Jarvi in ADDA Alicante

A concert program that devotes 77 minutes to a single work is not commonly encountered. Yes, there are the symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner and Shostakovich, but what else would commonly occupy such a length of time? It was with some excitement that this big event was anticipated.

The bill was, without question, up to the challenge. Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra is certainly one of the world’s leading orchestras, and Paavo Järvi’s name could not be bigger in the world of conducting. This particular Mahler Symphony, number seven, is one that I last heard in live performance in a concert over fifty years ago on London’s South Bank. So even the torrential rain in Alicante that surrounded this evening could not damp the enthusiastic anticipation.

Well, did the evening live up to the expectation? Of course it did. The performance was faultless, even brilliant at times, even if it could be argued the Paavo Järvi’s tempo in the faster sections of the first movement could have been a little faster. The overall impression, however, was that the contrasted were stark but never grotesque. This is truly sophisticated music that almost constantly surprises the listener, and it must be expertly played to make sense. The Tonhalle Orchestra took every challenge in its substantial stride and in this variation-like movement, one could not even hear the joins.

Mahler 7 is a groundbreaking symphony in many ways, not least in its structure. A first movement that is alternatively fast and then reflective lasts for 22 minutes. Its loose variation form revisits the same material, but Mahler’s imagination keeps the sound fresh throughout, never in the slightest repetitive. The central section of the movement, that momentary vision of marital bliss, does eventually disintegrate to chaos.

The finale is Mahler perhaps at his most optimistic. The movement seems to dance several waltzes along the way, but overall the feeling is that everyone is having a good time, even though the dance may seem to have a strange shape here and there.

The central scherzo is a very strange experience. Mahler more often than not uses the scherzo to be loud, abrasive, even cynical. But in the seventh, it seems more like a bad dream half-remembered. In between two movements, entitled Night Music, it sounds as if the composer was trying to get to sleep, then nodded off for a short time and dreamt, and then woke up before dawn to lie awake again. The night music movements are perhaps stranger than the scherzo, given their placement after a grand opening and before a triumph for conclusion. Overall, Mahler’s seventh seems like an inverted arch, with a keystone sticking up annoyingly in the middle to stop listeners from sliding down or up.

On a thoroughly successful evening, when the concert received rapturous applause from its audience, I find the need again to praise the ADDA audience for being such wonderful listeners. It’s as if this audience actually absorbs the music.

 

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Daniel Harding and the Swedish Symphony play Brahms 1 and 3 in ADDA, Alicante

 

Basically, in normal circumstances I would not regard a concert offering two Brahms symphonies as resembling a cup of tea. If that’s not mixing too many metaphors… But an advantage of subscribing to a series of events is that it prompts one to attend all of them and not to try to edit experience out of reality on the basis of preconceived standpoints. To have missed Daniel Harding with the Swedish Symphony Orchestra in Brahms Three and One in Alicante would have been a big mistake.

My problem with Brahms is long standing. It’s the same with many nineteenth century novels. I can’t empathize with the characters. I feel they are often preoccupied with irrelevance, and I hear the main mode of expression as circumlocution. I have always tended to find musical equivalence of these perceived shortcomings in the work of Brahms until very late in his creative career.

But my criticisms of the nineteenth century novel could come about because this particular reader does not fully enter into the world that is being described, or the lives that are being lived. It is not a criticism of Shakespeare that his work does not address quantum mechanics. Likewise, I should not criticize Brahms’s compositions for living within the scope of their time. So, it was this new attitude of toleration that I began this first exposure to the presence of Daniel Harding!

Daniel Harding does not simply conduct the music, he shapes it. He rarely beats time and equally rarely makes bold, eye-catching gestures aimed the audience’s attention. What he does do is coax the music into shape via visual interpretations of its meaning, gestures that clearly convey the right messages to his players. Here in these Brahms symphonies, the musical experience unfolds like in the novel, the themes almost characters in the telling of the story, the harmonies the events, which often surprise.

But to shape a piece of music into such a drama, one also needs an orchestra that can deliver the parts. And here in Alicante, the Swedish Symphony Orchestra clearly has such a superb understanding with its principal conductor that collectively they understood precisely what the demands and they clearly can always deliver it.

As a result of this chemistry that was so strong it could almost be felt by the audience, we heard two beautiful performances of these cornerstones of the repertoire. Both fresh and surprising throughout, these performances of the two Brahms symphonies prompted this skeptic to listen to them again and again.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky in Alicante's ADDA

 

Two concerts on consecutive days might be considered by some as a live event to far, especially when the concerts feature big, autobiographical works, one of which at least is widely regarded as difficult. But these two events in Alicante delivered by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev seemed to make light of the challenge and on both occasions an eager and adoring audience could easily have taken more.

A Friday night program was clearly constructed to show off this magnificent orchestra. We began with Wagner’s Prelude and Good Friday Music from Parsifal. Despite the composer’s reputation for excess, Parsifal, his last opera, is largely contemplative, slow, controlled and unspectacular. The forces are large, but the control is larger and allowed this superb orchestra to generate beautiful, luscious textures within the balance, sounds that give away the sensual aspects of this piece, all encased in an apparently single-minded religious devotion.

The program then offered Prokofiev’s classical symphony. Now this work is conceived as a neo-classical re-visitation of the world of Haydn and Mozart. But, despite its logistically small scale, musically it is sophisticated, often complex, a surreal view of the apparently literal. Throughout, this work’s beautiful interlinking string lines were completely clear, whist remaining integrated in the whole. The resulting surprising harmonies blended to a convincing transformation of world we once thought familiar and the always arresting rhythms were allowed to fight it out.

After the interval this audience was treated to a completely virtuosic performance of Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss. Now by definition and intention this music is autobiographical. This is the already successful Richard Strauss showing off. The piece is almost self-promotion, a brilliant succession of tableaux illustrating his claim to be able to do a multitude of things, including the deferral ad infinitum of an obvious cadence. It is also full of self-quotation from a career that had already flourished, despite the fact that there was a considerable amount yet to come from this composer who was only in his mid-forties. It is a poet’s statement, says its title, but the self-knowledge here is far from analytical. This is undoubtedly a work that demands complete mastery from the partnership that is conductor and orchestra, and this particular performance excelled. We were treated to an encore, a Strauss waltz, no relation.

Our second concert of this mini-series featured a single work, if the word single can be applied to the vast complexity of the fourth symphony of Shostakovich, which calls for more than a hundred performers. My personal take on this music is that it is also autobiographical, taking its listeners from birth to a question-marked death, eventually accompanied by the same faltering heartbeat in the basses that signs off Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique.

Autobiographical it may be, but here we are imagining a life yet to be lived by a composer in his thirties. Unlike the Strauss, here the process seems to be highly analytical and, crucially different from Strauss’s self-adulation, the internally reflective process of Shostakovich’s fourth symphony seems to lack confidence. To clarify, this lack of surety has nothing to do with compositional ability, nothing at all to do with an inability to express, and even less to do with the obvious technical mastery that the composer brought to his handling of the orchestra. But in this piece Shostakovich seemed to be conscious of pushing the limits. If only I might express myself, this is what I would like to say. If only I had the space…

Well, we know now that Shostakovich did not have the space and that he withdrew the work and waited twenty-five years before he heard it played, when times were marginally easier for artists. One is left reflecting what the composer might have written subsequently if the work had been allowed its original space. It is paradoxical that his best loved symphony in the West remains the fifth, a work in which he self-corrected the “excesses” that had preceded it. By a quirk of programming, perhaps by design, the next concert in ADDA will feature the fifth.

The forces required were obviously too great for a touring orchestra to muster and so the numbers were made up by incorporating several members of ADDA’s resident orchestra. The achievement of this ad hoc combination was nothing less than breath-taking. This is perhaps one of the most difficult of all works to interpret and yet, despite the scratch team, the performance was nothing less than faultless. Gergiev’s tempi were quite fast in movements two and three, which increases demands of cohesion amongst the strings, a challenge that these players met as if they had played together all their lives.

The fourth symphony takes its audience to some scary places. Even when we waltz, we feel we are looking over our shoulders, and even when we go to the circus, we are watching our back. The heartbeat is permanent, however, and we know we are alive throughout. When, late on, we look back on our achievements, the climax is vast, but the sensation is hollow. There are still things we have not said, and the apparent pride is unconvincing.

But the magnificence of the final questioned peace is undiminished. The heart may falter and the body decline, but eventually we are what we are, nothing more. And that is probably when we realise we control precisely nothing and that what went before may as well have been a dream. Sounds like Shakespeare.

I have written of the work elsewhere, but this live performance, only the second one I have had the privilege to attend, confirms in my own mind a personal view that this work, the Symphony Number Four of Dmitri Shostakovich, is nothing less than the greatest single work of art the human race has thus far produced. Okay, I will tone down the superlatives: it is the human race’s greatest artwork that I personally have encountered. And this performance did it more than justice.

The Leningrad Symphony – a personal interpretation of the Symphony No.7 Op.60 Dmitri Shostakovich

Like much music of quality, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Leningrad, is either loved or hated, rather than tolerated. It is famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for its first movement, a unique statement in the history of music, a movement lasting just under half of the symphony’s massive eighty minutes. It is also music, I believe, that is uniquely misunderstood, the popular interpretation being far too naïve an analysis of the motives of a composer as unpredictably and alternatively complex and trite as Shostakovich. So this is my personal version. First the description. I apologise if you already know the piece.

The piece opens with a confident, harmonically complex theme which seems to pass from one place to another, from one orchestral section to another like question, answer and analysis. It seems to portray life lived ordinarily, but tangibly celebrating the sophistication and tolerance of negotiated social contact. There is conflict here, but resolution is at hand through thought, interaction and experience. The music seems to offer a sense of life lived in the unending complexity of community.

But then the movement’s often derided second section begins. Over the “bolero-like” insistence of a repeated drum rhythm, an apparently innocuous, vaguely brainless, almost pop music joke theme strikes up, quietly at first, almost as if apologising for its own banality. The theme is repeated alongside an associated answering and balancing motif from the same mould. But it keeps getting louder and more assertive until eventually it transforms into a menacing presence that threatens violence. At its climax, the theme becomes a series of explosions which obviously refer to conflict and war. The complex theme of the opening returns to compete and the music fights out an exhausted resolution where the original sophisticated theme triumphs, but in an exhausted, empty way whilst the trite naivety of the drum rhythm reminds us that banality is not completely defeated.

The movement is often presented as entirely programmatic, as if it were film music. The complex themes at the start are the good people of Leningrad going about their daily lives, hence the sense of sophistication, an interpretation arising from a singularly patriotic interpretation of the work. The repeated intensity of the pop-like trivial tune is often described as the advancing German army. It begins quietly because it’s in the distance and gets louder as it approaches. On its arrival in Leningrad conflict is inevitable and, yes, the good people of Leningrad prevail, but achieve only an exhausted victory from which they can never recreate their original sophistication.

Now I have a problem with this view of the work, largely because, if it is accepted, the other movements make little sense. It is true that Shostakovich might have originally composed the first movement as a free-standing work and only added the other movements as an afterthought. It is also true that he himself summarised the symphony’s movements as War, Recollection, My Homeland and Victory, but I think that, as ever, the constraints that Stalinism placed on opinion rendered the composer more reticent than he might have chosen to be. I do think that the Leningrad’s first movement is programmatic, but I contend that its subject matter is ideology and that its intention could even be essentially propagandist, rather than patriotic. The fact that it does not believe its own propaganda, or indeed slants it in a way that might have caused displeasure to officialdom is the crucial element in my argument, because then the other three movements become nothing less than essential as attempts to answer the charges, to answer the questions.

Yes, the harmonic complexity of the opening theme must remain a depiction of the happy, sophisticated citizens of Leningrad going about their negotiated lives. But it’s a picture of the social interaction, an idealised socialism. It’s a portrait of what happy, democratised Soviets ought to be. The naïve repeated theme that follows is no German army, however. It is a musical depiction of the very concept of fascism. As with Nazism, itself, it begins small, almost unnoticed, its voice hardly heard. It is almost self-deprecatory in recognising the stupidity, the utter inanity of its own content, thus reflecting concepts such as nationalism, racism and other essential elements of such no-brain politics. But what can you do with a stupid message except repeat it? You can’t develop something that begins inane and stays that way. But you can repeat it and hope that it attracts the intellectually like-minded, the idiot, who will espouse its brainless simplicity because of the ease with which something without either content or rigour can be believed. And voices of support are added, slowly at first, but added nevertheless, and that’s why everything gets louder. And it doesn’t change because, having neither debate nor sophistication, it can’t change. It just asserts its own nonsense and inanity more forcefully. But now it is dangerous, largely because it has mobilised support amongst those who want to follow it blindly. So the repeated theme is the ideology of fascism and its triumph is the overbearing assertion of its own crassness. Its graduation to assertion beyond its own borders and thus to conflict is inevitable.

But in the end, of course, it fails, because once motivated the democratic, sophisticated, analytical ideology of the Soviet citizens of Leningrad will prevail. So the entire movement is an ideological conflict between fascism and Soviet socialism, with the latter, albeit exhausted, eventually victorious, despite the nagging continued presence of the former at the end of the movement. So that’s that. Or is it?

It is my suggestion that Dmitri Shostakovich did not believe this, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s why we need the other three movements. The second is thematically related to the opening of the first, but the music is almost exhausted, bereft of the sophisticated energy of the beginning. Is this where we finished after the “war”, or in fact was it a different view of where we started – not so confident, not so sophisticated, just worn down? If so, then this movement is a different way of looking at the ideological propaganda of the first movement, for propaganda was what it was.

The third movement is again thematically related, but everything is slowed down. The sonorities are those of the Russian Orthodox Church in places. Its obvious nostalgia again harks back to a state and time where we idealised our past, but where that past might even have attained the ideal. We are separated from it now, and its utopia can only be imagined or perhaps worshipped.

The fourth movement now becomes the ideological key to the entire work. Yes, it is triumphant. Yes, it asserts and reaffirms an ultimate victory, but its climaxes are grand rather than heartfelt. It finds its expression via the musical platitudes that Shostakovich made his hallmark. So, yes, we have prevailed. Yes, we have also won. We have defeated the ideology of fascism manifest as enemy, as depicted in the propaganda of the first movement. But what we have achieved is neither the sophistication we claimed at the outset nor its idealised memory from some imagined past. The opening theme is there at the end, but it has lost all confidence in itself. There is a hollowness about the success, a questioning about which side of the overall ideological conflict actually prevailed. So when the great patriotic symphony that in some estimations celebrates victory in the Great Patriotic War ends triumphantly, it is not just exhausted but also disillusioned because the naivety of the outcome bears considerable resemblance to what we originally opposed. Now that’s sophisticated.