QUINTESSENTIALLY | Insider | BBC

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Mahler 4 followed by Mahler 5: Thursday night at the Royal Albert Hall was a sell-out. All seats were taken for the appearance of Valery Gergiev’s World Orchestra for Peace, the orchestral master group that Georg Solti put together to mark the UN’s half-century. They have played together only twelve times in the fifteen years since then, but who could tell? Those who rose to their feet for ten minutes following the Rondo-Finale of Mahler’s Fifth were applauding the effervescent beauty of Gergiev’s translation. Carefully exploited silences; the intricate interplay between woodwind, strings and horn; the subtle rendering of sounds worked up into one pure mood – maddened, profoundly melancholic, sadistically ambivalent.

Most of the Russian’s ‘moments’ came towards the end, however. The Fourth Symphony – compared by Mahler to a ‘forest with all its mysteries and its horrors’ – was never quite tragic enough. It’s supposed to end with a child’s vision of heaven; and yet these children are not pure, and what Mahler meant by ‘child-like’ didn’t carry forward. In Mahler’s text, the children suffer intensely, but in their suffering prove sublimely callous. In the first movement, they lead a ‘guiltless, patient, a lovely lamb to death!’ The Finale’s soprano is too white, too empathetic to the cries of oboe and low horn to remind us of that this paradise shimmers with milk and blood, an ambiguous, even perverse heaven where ‘Saint Luke is slaughtering the oxen’.

Gergiev obviously saw all this ‘Heavenly Life’ as a passing fancy, an appetizer to the Fifth’s more grounded theme. If Mahler’s work is a self-portrait – the artist never too far removed from the art – then his life was certainly more interesting when he composed this famous Fifth symphony, unleashing the impulsive power of the brass to devastating effect. The Fifth was started in early 1901, when he met and fell feverishly in love with Alma Schindler. It was finished in the summer of 1902, six months after he was almost killed by a sudden hemorrhage. And these extremes of emotion are compounded in the five movements – boundless optimism suddenly shaken with a convulsive terror.

Timur Martynov, with his bold trumpet solo, ramped up the first movement before the ‘suddenly faster-passionate-wild’ brass burned in agonizing duet with the violins. The frisson of danger subsides into the second movement, but the lonely stroke of the timpani, and the Siberian bleakness of the muted trumpet is too much too soon, and we plunge head-first into hell-on-earth without even a glance at eternity. After the second part comes the most popular of Mahler’s works; The Adagietto is a feverish protestation of his love for Alma. And what Gergiev did was steep it in a tender sensuality. The second violins took centre stage, quietly undressing their sounds before the first strings came back with more warmth, a gentle masculinity. The tempo was perfect, and Gergiev found just the right sentiment to expose Mahler’s masterpiece.

With Mahler, the details usually matter. Gergiev did well with the big-movements, the tragic poise – his talent too rich to waste on painstaking calculation. He spared us the perfection of style and structure often associated with Mahler, and gave us a raw freshness that few conductors manage to rake from it.

More Mahler at The Proms
Saturday 21 August, 7.30pm Prom 48
Wednesday 1 September, 7.30pm Prom 62
Friday 3 September, 7.30pm Prom 65

For full Proms listings, and to book tickets, visit www.bbc.co.uk/proms.