Choose life: Oramo's Mahler 9 leaves death for the last page

Mahler’s Ninth may be a symphony soaked in lateness and leave-taking, but it stages a struggle to be fought and experienced in a perpetual here and now. That sense of immediacy conquering retrospection was one of the strongest features of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance on Saturday, to open their Barbican season.

The seating capacity of the Barbican may only be 25% less than the Royal Festival Hall, but it always feels smaller than that: more intimate or more cramped depending on your perspective, or your seat, or the piece you’ve come to hear. Mahler, in particular, tests and stretches the hall’s acoustic to its limit, sometimes beyond. At least until the final pages of the symphony’s first and last movements, Sakari Oramo rarely elicited any truly quiet playing from the BBCSO, or at any rate playing that fell quietly on the ear (when it was forced to compete with outbursts from a bronchial audience). This relatively narrow dynamic envelope confronted us with the violent throes of a struggle between major and minor, life and death, harmony and chaos, take your pick.

What seemed initially trenchant and even plain-spoken about Oramo’s approach to the long opening Andante, and its irresolute attraction to the alternating magnetic poles of D minor and major, gradually paid off: firstly in the steady accumulation of tension towards the bell-capped nemesis, and then in folding the following movements back into its patient embrace. Oramo inserted a prominent caesura around halfway through the movement, thus diminishing the impact of the general pause which Mahler makes a few bars later, but otherwise made admirably lucid sense of a score which the composer would doubtless have revised in his usual way, had he lived to conduct it himself.

As in their gripping account of the Sixth a year ago, the divided violins – firsts and seconds either side of Oramo – opened out Mahler’s intricate counterpoint. Such clarity of texture and purpose paid especially satisfying dividends in the clapped-out yokels’ dances of the Ländler and the furious, fugue-on-steroids whirl of the Rondo-Burleske, which featured distinctively stylish solo work from bassoonist Amy Harman and flautist Daniel Pailthorpe. Oramo knows his Nielsen backwards, and in addressing Mahler 9 for the first time he found no trouble in identifying and giving a nudge to those obstinate-indolent wind gestures where Mahler sounds almost more Nielsen than Nielsen does.

Elsewhere in the Ninth, it can seem as though Mahler is writing a double-bar to the whole symphonic tradition as well as to his own career (prematurely so, as it turned out), by either drawing upon or referring to other “last will and symphony” works written within the previous 20 years: the Ninths of Bruckner and Dvořák, and especially the Pathétique of Tchaikovsky. Oramo did well to keep a pulse and an ardent life-force flowing through the overlapping cadences of the final Adagio, until the transcendent disintegration of its final page. Each listener will come to this moment with their own ears and history: I heard in it neither the neutral ebbing away of Herbert Blomstedt’s recent Philharmonia account, nor the unearthly distance achieved by Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO, but something more akin to the contemporary gilded canvases of Klimt in a deliquescence of musical gesture, as notes inexorably become silence.