A full house came to see and hear what was billed as “Mäkelä conducts Mahler’s Fifth” and, sure enough, that’s what happened. But he also conducted Schubert and his interlocutor, Luciano Berio, in a tribute to the Italian master to mark his centenary. The programming of supporting works for Mahler symphonies is always a curious exercise; Klaus Mäkelä’s choice, Berio’s Rendering, picked up on the composer’s observation that the expressive climate of Schubert’s late music seemed inhabited by Mahler’s spirit. So the stage was set for an unusual and fascinating pairing in which the masterly playing of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra set the seal on a great night at the Proms.
Rendering is an astonishing act of homage. Berio took the sketches for a tenth symphony on which Schubert was working when death stole him away, and created a three-movement work that gives an oblique glimpse into the nature of artistic creation. It is not a completion or a reconstruction, but the “restoration” of the sketches, aimed at reviving the old colours without disguising the damage, which Berio compared to the restoration of a fresco. So there is not a hint of pastiche; the added colours are Berio’s own and their insertion into Schubert’s work is signalled by a celesta, a masterstroke of compositional flair. In Mäkelä’s hands the results blossomed into life: glowing brass, shimmering strings, sparkling winds and the celesta providing a delicately-muted patina. It was a tantalising insight into Schubert beginning to edge his way out of Beethoven’s looming shadow.
As to Mäkelä’s conducting of Mahler’s Fifth, it did not disappoint. Although there were no ground-breaking insights into this most brilliantly bizarre of works, it was obvious that he has a passion for the piece and the orchestra matched his enthusiasm for its formal eccentricities, its tonal mood-swings and, in the end, the dramatic drive of its peroration. Given there are differing opinions about what the work is “about” I decided that on this occasion I would willingly follow the Chief Conductor Designate down the rabbit-hole world created by Mahler. As a sequel to Rendition, I claimed the funeral march for Schubert, that hero whom Earth was asked to take for cherishing. Mäkelä’s pacing was certainly stern and measured, but the response from the orchestra was the epitome of nobility, wonderfully announced by the trumpet of Omar Tomasini. I then drifted with the manically-obsessive sounds of the second movement into a1960s-style happening that was in full flow sixty years before its time. It was, like, man, heavy. Dig those cats from Amsterdam!
For the Scherzo I scrambled up the rugged landscape of Caspar David Friedrich in the company of the finely-crafted sound of horn-player Kate Woolley, and into the crisp, taught and bracing air of strings on wings. The same players then took to the water for the Adagietto; it might have been a love song, but I grasped it as a ten-minute evocation of the pleasures of a moonlit night on the Danube. In the Finale, I sat with Mahler in the little structure he used for composing and watched the orchestra rip through his homage to Bach. Mäkelä drove it with fervour, using the return of the chorale to plant his flag amongst all the others who reached that summit in triumph. As the players left the stage, a final image was of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains, Rick and Louis in Casablanca, walking off into the night at the start of a beautiful friendship.
