There are ways and ways to engage with music of the past. For Rolf Martinsson, the UK premiere of whose song cycle Ich denke Dein… began Sunday evening’s Three Choirs Festival concert, the approach was to imagine a compositional landscape in which most of the last century had never happened. His musical language is an amalgam of late Romanticism, Hollywood film scores, Broadway musicals and Easy listening, blended so as to produce extreme levels of heady opulence.
The opening movement, setting Goethe’s Nearness of the Beloved, was the piece at its most effective. This was in part due to the way that Martinsson, despite the odds stacked against him, more-or-less managed to sidestep clichés to create a surprisingly moving, ravishing music, like Nelson Riddle on steroids. Yet in hindsight, it was mainly due to the fact that, at this stage, the ear hadn’t begun to tire of the continual anachronisms wrapped up in such a relentless overload of sentimentality. Martinsson’s not alone in wishing for an alternate timeline of the 20th century, devoid of the avant-garde’s innovations and expansions, but this kind of sugar-fuelled nostalgia trip hardly came across as an attractive parallel universe. Elizabeth Llewellyn was superb throughout – especially in that telling first movement – holding her own against an orchestra continually threatening to overwhelm, her rich voice the perfect mouthpiece for such intoxicated love music. Perhaps the answer to why someone would fabricate an ersatz schmalzy gewgaw like this lies in its subject matter: love, after all, can make anyone do foolish things.
Mahler’s Symphony no. 4 in G major taps into the mannerisms of the Classical period though, in contrast to Martinsson, integrates them within his own distinctive musical language. The overwhelming success of this performance was down to the way Emilia Hoving established the light, gentle demeanour with which the work begins as its ‘default’ position. At first, it seemed as if she simply wanted to keep her head down through the more edgy passages, as if not knowing what to do with them. However, it soon became apparent that treating them as aberrations in an otherwise optimistic soundworld made total sense.
Mahler’s conflicted interplay of light and dark thereby became all the more transparent, particularly because Hoving, though regarding them as temporary, did not seek to brush aside the symphony’s ominous strands but embraced them, allowing them to flourish as potent threats. This was reinforced by the way in which, despite being in the unforgiving environment of a cathedral, the Philharmonia managed to reveal large amounts of inner detail, making Mahler’s convoluted counterpoint extremely clear.
As a consequence, when the music subsequently calmed, there was an implied sigh of relief (almost literally in the first movement, Hoving allowing a long pause before the start of the recapitulation), and the flowing lyricism sounded brighter than ever. This push and pull of tension was especially effective in the third movement, Hoving interpreting the shift of the main theme into triple metre as the tentative beginnings of a waltz, in due course converted into a full-blown romp, leading to such a sense of triumph it suggested that there was nothing left to come and that this was, in fact, the symphony’s finale.
As such, the final movement did indeed sound like an epilogue, simple and sublime, Hoving appropriately restraining the orchestra so as to shift into accompanying mode. Llewellyn’s hefty soprano didn’t really suit the soft innocence needed for this song, but the orchestra did a wonderful job of echoing her sentiments, with string glissandos sounding like sighs of happiness before lilting off to sleep.
