“Simone Young has opened each of her seasons as Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with one of Mahler’s symphonies to rave reviews”. That’s what the promo says, and it’s true, starting with the Resurrection, which reopened the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, then numbers 1, 5 and 3. Why not 9 in 2026, even if Mahler himself was reluctant to call the substantial and moving Song of the Earth a symphony?
I fear that context has to be a factor. This year, the conductor seems to have handed over aspects of the programming to the French. Mostly Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the splendid pianist who must have proposed the 17-minute Qigang Chen’s Er Huang piano concerto based on Peking Opera themes which he’s played around the world. That would surely go with Mahler’s seven poems from the Chinese of Das Lied von der Erde. And maybe it did, for I heard more Debussy from this student of Messiaen than the glorious clashing cymbals that define Chinese opera for me.
But I imagine someone else then realised the imbalance in the two halves of the concert and – at the last minute – threw in a sparkling performance of Gershwin’s Variations on ‘I got rhythm’, unannounced in the programme. One couldn’t complain about either Thibaudet’s or the orchestra’s performance, but did it really lead us into that 65-minute Mahlerian edifice in which the ephemeral beauty of the world is set against the essential tragedy of human lives?
Fortunately, many of us were able to make the jump during the interval, with Heldentenor Simon O’Neill leaping headfirst into the Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth. As Young was barely holding her splendid forces back, making O’Neill more one of them than a detached soloist, surely all had drained “the golden goblet to the bottom”.
Contralto Alexandra Ionis then linked with Shefali Prior’s plaintive oboe to prove that she too could be as one with band. Hers was a chocolate sound and an external expression of the drama of The Lonely Man in Autumn rather than the internalised melancholy of Kathleen Ferrier in the immortal Bruno Walter recording. But arguably, her character is a commentator rather than a player, offering a big smile for the horsey lads in Of Beauty and a sympathetic understanding of the girls’ yearning gazes after them.
O’Neill then returned to shine like one of those lads in Of Youth, and to pick up the bottle again as the strings lurched behind him in The Drunkard in Spring. Those Tang Dynasty poets certainly appreciated their wine!
But the highpoint of the night was surely the continued harmony of Ionis and the SSO winds – flute, contrabassoon, bass clarinet, piccolo and clarinets all joining the oboe and cor anglais to seize their moments in the sun in The Farewell. The Moldavian-born contralto was now a perfect match for Adorno’s theory that Mahler’s best attempts at Orientalism went no further than the music of the Shtetl.
