Aside from all the cancellations, of course, my worst musical experience of lockdown was the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s streamed performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony for the 2020 online Edinburgh International Festival. It was in Klaus Simon's much reduced arrangement, which doesn’t include timpani – don’t even ask how the finale began – played by a tiny group of musicians spread out disconsolately in an empty Festival Theatre. It was played well enough, but desperately dispiriting to watch.
All is forgiven after this Usher Hall performance, however, of the full-fat version, the latest instalment in Music Director Thomas Søndergård’s long-running Mahler cycle with the orchestra. Søndergård has proved himself an expert in building Mahler’s great paragraphs, and that was evident in an opening that was taut and lithe, making way for a main Allegro that seemed to be straining at the leash to get going. Once it did, the whole orchestra seemed to bound forward with energetic heft, led by a forthright quintet of horns and an army of woodwinds that weren’t afraid to spit out their musical lines with a touch of vulgarity. There was heft aplenty in the outer movements and, in the finale, the brass played the main theme with so fabulous a gleam that they strongly grounded a Rondo that’s permanently at risk of sounding chaotic.
It wasn’t all large scale, however. The first movement’s central interlude wasn’t so much pastoral as celestial, with its undulating harps and shimmering high violins, and the second Nachtmusik movement sounded like a schmaltzy serenade, all the more attractive for the way the orchestra were so keen to lean into the naffness. The Scherzo had a bite of satire in its shadows, and the second movement sounded more like a dance than a march, with interweaving instrumental lines of rare delicacy. Add in some first-rate solos, not least from Chris Flynn’s scene-stealing tenor tuba and Amadea Dazeley-Gaist’s glowing Principal Horn, and you had a performance that was about as strong an argument as you could get for what’s still the composer’s most problematic symphony.
No such problems, but every bit as much delicacy, in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major as played by Francesco Piemontesi, whose gorgeous, fluid piano line brought laser-like precision to the rippling opening articulating every note precisely while maintaining a twinkling flow, against which the orchestral piccolo and triangle seemed to be mischievously winking. Piemontesi then summoned up a gorgeous legato for the piano’s slower music, intoxicatingly so in a second movement so sensuously soft that it seemed to be withdrawing into itself.
There was pinprick delicacy to Oliver Knussen’s Flourish with Fireworks, too, with some orchestral glitter and a fair degree of punch, but it wasn’t enough to dissuade me that this is an oddly unexciting piece to have such a terrific title.
