When it comes to Mahler (especially late Mahler), conductors generally pick a lane: Romantic or Modernist. Considering the nature and temperament that Kazuki Yamada has shown during his tenure with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, one might have expected the former. Yet Thursday night’s concert – a special occasion, dedicated to those connected to the orchestra who have died in the past year – was an emphatic display of the latter, though highly emotionally-charged.
The context for this was provided by Takemitsu’s short but potent Requiem. Its melodic phrases were made to feel like half-remembered fragments from something more expansive, while the recurring edgy passages were genuinely painful in the way they broke composure. With its stark mix of gentle and sharp, smooth and angular, soothing and lost simultaneously, Requiem served as a miniature paradigm of everything that was to follow.
The emotion in Mahler’s Symphony no. 9 in D major was primarily articulated through Yamada’s highly flexible use of rubato. One can imagine some purists bristling at the elasticity, the long lingering on an upbeat, the protracted pauses between phrases, yet this was all the product of a vision so clear one might almost call it high-concept. The opening Andante comodo had the flavour of the evening golden hour. Yet its warmth was laden with tiredness, conveying a powerful sense of difficult wrangling between its larger – and smaller-scale materials. It was in the movement’s series of collapses (so redolent of the Sixth Symphony’s finale) that the modernity of the work was especially clearly projected. Suddenly we were plunged into an eldritch, expressionistic nightmare, with the slow transitions back to light and melody heartstoppingly hushed. The pulse felt like a march to the scaffold, yet poignancy was everywhere, Yamada causing the music to reform as a slow dance – or, perhaps, the fond memory of one.
The second movement picked up where this left off, Yamada, hitherto deeply sombre, becoming animated, the CBSO rendering the music an ungainly dance. With a measured pace and jarring gear changes – not remotely smooth or slick – it was like watching an old man trying to swagger. As such, the grotesquerie of the music was made paramount, with the winds in particular not trying to artificially blend their parts but letting them speak for the strange, angular lines that they are.
Likewise the Rondo-Burleske, which Yamada rendered an unhinged cavalcade of counterpoint. Its fin de siècle fugato overflowed with wild-eyed zeal, the phrases neither clean nor clear, players overlapping, interrupting each other on a whim, begging the question as to whether the music was playful or had simply lost the plot. Considering the way Yamada introduced the later ethereality, its lyricism touching on a profundity and depth we hadn’t heard since the first movement, the latter seemed more likely. All the more so as the orchestra re-erupted, driven on with complete abandon, by this stage less burleske than danse macabre.
That glimmer of radiant clarity in the Rondo was brought into focus in the closing Adagio. After the middle movement’s diversions, we were back in a place of purest authenticity: happy, sad, real. Contrapuntal again, but gentle now, sympathetic, suffused with passion, warmth and love. Here, too, the winds protruded through the texture but without a trace of grotesque, speaking with heartfelt intimacy, winding down. Nonetheless, desperation cut through its closing climax, as much from Yamada as Mahler, the strings dramatically glissandoing between phrases, continuing to spotlight the work’s startlingly modernist touches. The ending was like a redemption of those dark transitions from the Andante, no longer a nightmare, but with a hush that was no less haunting.
