Hardenberger shines, but the London Symphony Orchestra’s Widmann and Mahler disappoint

Unaccompanied by any soloist, Daniel Harding arrives on the Barbican stage. The audience applauds, the house lights go dark. Some moments later, we hear the distant, haunting sound of a trumpeter offstage. Håkan Hardenberger’s sound gets closer and is joined by other sounds as the lights are faded slowly up: first a second trumpeter, then other instruments of the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a magical opening to a concert – and it will be mirrored at the end of Jörg Widmann’s trumpet concerto Towards Paradise (Labyrinth VI) as the soloist slowly departs from the stage while the lights fade to black.

Listening to Hardenberger play trumpet is an extraordinary experience, something that should be on any music lover’s bucket list. The man produces an unequalled beauty of tone; when he plays one of these long-breathed cantabile melodies, the timbre and the elegance of Hardenberger’s phrasing send one into raptures. If he’s playing fast, whether smooth scales or flutter-tongued tremolo, he makes it sound natural in a way I’ve never heard from another brass player. It’s just magnificent.

If only I could be as positive about Widmann’s music. From that lyrical beginning, there’s a gradual descent into a spell of cacophony and from there, a good part of the 37-minute concerto is devoted to altercations between trumpet and orchestra, virtuosic bursts of rapid fire from the soloist and varied responses from different combinations of instruments. It’s all quite impressive but feels very disjointed. 

I personally doubt that anything will ever persuade me that a classical orchestra can form a good counterpart to a soloist who sounds like he’s playing free jazz, particularly when none of the music is improvised – and Towards Paradise certainly isn’t the piece that’s going to do it. And while I’m all for pieces which make use of the rich variety of percussion instruments available to composers today, repeated use of bowed percussion makes for an unpleasant listening experience when the prevailing pitch puts most of the notes close to the limits of audibility for my sexagenarian ears.

Still, a gorgeous-sounding trumpet fading into the distance made for an appropriate end to a first half when the second was to start with the hit-em-between-the-eyes trumpet solo that opens Mahler’s Symphony no. 5. And credit to the LSO’s James Fountain for making a pretty good fist of the (perhaps thankless) task of matching the quality of Hardenberger’s sound: those first bars were full of promise for the funeral march to follow. But that promise wasn’t delivered. The orchestral entry, which should be overwhelming, shattering, came across as rather tame. The lyrical second figure on strings was better and the soft padding funereal tread coming through cogently. But overall, both watching Harding’s neat, precise movements and listening to the resulting sound gave an impression of restraint, as if Mahler’s emotional hounds were being kept on a very tight leash.

That impression persisted through the remainder of the work. The climax of the second movement was properly triumphant, but the ensuing waltz in the third was decidedly stiff-legged: there was no sense of abandon or even of the homely cheer of a Ländler. From there on, the best passages came from the strings: some incisive pizzicato in the third movement, the urgency of rapidly bowed cellos and basses in the fifth. For a symphony that offers so many opportunities to an orchestra to probe the extremes, it all felt very conventional.