Thomas Søndergård began a Mahler cycle with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra when he was first appointed Music Director in 2018. Covid blew it off course, aside from a scaled down online Mahler 7 during lockdown. I wondered whether it would ever restart, but it seems to have got its legs back because Søndergård is conducting two Mahler symphonies in the next twelve months. The Ninth features in February, and they kicked off their season off in grand style with the Second.
And if their Mahler cycle is back on track then that’s good news, because this performance brought out the best in both conductor and orchestra. Søndergård conducts Mahler with a strong sense of grip and a focus on where it’s all heading. He took the first movement more rapidly than I’d expected so that, truth be told, there wasn’t much maestoso to it. However, he drove it with remorseless focus, and the orchestra responded with terrific bite in the strings, awesome weight in the brass and woodwinds that lent light and air to the texture. The central sequence of dissonances felt almost apocalyptic, and Søndergård wasn’t afraid to embrace extremes of dynamics to heighten the dramatic tension.
The strings sounded genial and warm in the second movement, but with a hint of snarl in the texture, as though this was a smile that always threatened to turn to a rictus grin. The Scherzo flowed forwards convincingly, but sounded greasy, oleaginous, elusive, so that the climactic howl of pain felt both inevitable and unavoidable. When it was revisited in the opening roar of the finale, it set the scene for an epic piece of storytelling over which Søndergård kept admirable control; at least up until the final moments where the climactic rush of converging elements proved impossible to contain, and the orchestra sounded regrettably unsure about exactly when to sound the final chord.
Before that, however, Søndergård paced the sprawling, episodic final movement in a manner that was steady, never histrionic; and even the special effects, such as the offstage band or the endless drumroll, were integrated parts of the whole rather than stagey or overegged. The texture was thunderous when it needed to be, but often remarkably subtle, and a special chapeau to the four trombones plus tuba, who played their march theme as though they were singing a chorale.
Only the singing provided a slight disappointment, though not Julie Roset’s celestial soprano, which was clean and focused throughout. The RSNO Chorus sang their quiet opening lines with beautiful focus, even if the tenors were a little too audible; but the ending turned into a bit of a yell, as though they’d been told to give it maximum welly and not much else. Unfortunately, Linda Watson’s mezzo struggled with pitching and focus throughout, and she didn't help herself with some distractingly histrionic hand gestures in Urlicht. From the point of view of the orchestra and conductor, however, this was a high octane performance that was highly successful. Roll on the Ninth.
