On paper it all looked so promising. A conductor with a fine Mahlerian pedigree and a crack orchestra which has given many memorable performances of that composer’s longest symphony. That includes one which I was privileged to attend in June 1970 with Jascha Horenstein. My memories of Michael Tilson Thomas also go back a long way, when he coincidentally conducted another Mahler symphony with a different orchestra all of 50 years ago.
Sadly, MTT is now a pale shadow of his former self, and it is only thanks to the professionalism of the London Symphony Orchestra that this performance did not run aground before the concluding bars were reached.
There were some positives. The fourth movement had all the mysteriousness the composer intended, carried by the finely wrought singing of Alice Coote, pitch-perfect from her first entry, rich and resonant in her deepest register for “Die Welt ist tief” and full of glowing ardour for the single word “Lust”. The two choral forces, the sopranos and altos of the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir, were well-matched numerically and sonically. Together, they delivered celestial sounds in the five-minute fifth movement. Instrumental solos were generally impressive: Benjamin Gilmore’s violin, Isobel Daws’ trombone (with phenomenal breath control at very laboured speeds) and Julian Bliss leading a fine clarinet section.
Soon into the long opening movement, just shy of 40 minutes in this performance, it became apparent that the same basic pulse, with insufficient delineation between the dark primordial rumblings, pastoral evocations and the glitter and glitz of military-style music, was starving the work of essential contrasts. Summer didn’t march in, as intended. Instead, it shuffled its way forward. The only real examples of life and energy came from the dramatic thwacks of the timpani. I constantly felt the LSO was straining at the leash, while MTT’s repeated fluttering of the fingers of his left hand, often quite contradictory in effect, merely exposed imprecisions in ensemble due no doubt to insufficient rehearsal.
You have to have some sympathy for any interpreter of this symphony. As with so many of his other scores, Mahler peppers virtually every page with complicated instructions. However, a cavalier attitude to the composer’s intentions disrupts and impairs what the work has to offer. At the end of the first movement Mahler specifies “a long pause”. MTT allowed just a single minute, which was probably all for the good, otherwise the audience would have been seated for a full two hours. Much more serious was the conductor’s complete disregard for the need to play the final three movements without a break. Before the fifth, it looked as though MTT was unsure of what he was expected to do next. At the end of that movement he closed the score, turned to face the audience and muttered that it had been a good warm-up for the next few days. The Finale followed after a three-minute hiatus, devoid of the seamlessness and radiance the music demands.
The third movement of Mahler’s Third, ostensibly a Scherzo, is one of the most magical and atmospheric pieces he ever wrote. At its heart is a posthorn solo, played here by Matthew Williams, the sounds of which should float in the wind above a cushion of susurrating strings. Mahler directs that the instrument should sound “from afar”. Not only was this solo far too loud, it completely obliterated what the strings were doing.