Last night, the Toronto Symphony was away on its annual exchange trip and we had the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal under their renowned music director, Kent Nagano. The program consisted solely of Mahler's Symphony # 7, performed (rightly) without intermission.
To call this a risky calling card is an understatement. "The schizophrenic Seventh", as somebody once described it, is the most problematic of all the Mahler symphonies, a world at war with itself in many respects. Oddly enough, this performance was most successful at the precise point where most conductors get into severe difficulties.
The orchestral playing was splendid, full of fire and passion. In the whole sprawling canvas I only detected one false note and I'm sure the player in question is still blushing. But then, nobody ever gets through a Mahler symphony without a few minor slips. After so many years under world-class conductors, the excellence of the Montreal players continues to set a standard for all of Canada.
Which brings me to the question marks of the performance, all of them connected with music director Nagano's interpretive choices. Mahler necessarily requires a good deal of ebb and flow in tempos, and many of the changes are indicated in the score. The first movement stayed firmly locked into its initial tempo for a very long time, and this tilted the tone away from dark and spectral towards dogged and determined. Once Nagano did begin allowing some give and take the music became more lifelike. Right at the end, the orchestra began to come apart on one of the accelerandos towards the final cadence -- the conductor kept increasing the rate of acceleration exponentially. But these are all fairly minor issues.
Real trouble began with the next two movements, the first Nachtmusik ("Night Music" -- so designated by Mahler) and the scherzo which the composer labelled Schattenhaft ("Shadowy"). The Nachtmusik opens with a horn solo followed by its own echo from off stage. Off stage players feature in many Mahler symphonies, and can easily be made audible at a distance by opening one of the side-stage doors in Roy Thomson Hall. Nagano chose to keep those doors shut, and even with the audience in pin-drop stillness the echo was all but inaudible. I'm sure anyone with any degree of hearing impairment would have heard only a long silence.
Then came the pauses. Both second and third movements have measured silences built into them -- long rests during which the tempo continues to move. Why did Nagano choose to add lengthy unmeasured pauses to the measured ones? The effect was to break the unity of the music. This was especially disruptive to the scherzo where the moto perpetuo effect is an essential part of the piece's nightmarish quality. And it happened 3 or 4 times, which made the breaks even more jarring.
The fourth movement, also labelled Nachtmusik, calls for a tempo of andante amoroso. It's a gentle, smooth-flowing, serenade-like movement with passages for a guitar and a mandolin interwoven. It's the closest the symphony comes to a slow movement and a point of relative repose. Nagano chose to take it at a much faster speed than usual, and as a result the relaxed Viennese quality vanished, replaced by a tense, hectic rush to the finish line. Only in the final bars did the music settle down into the kind of dreamlike close that Mahler obviously wanted, the final notes evaporating into the air.
The raucous, celebratory rondo finale is where most conductors get into trouble, due to the numerous stops and starts and gear changes. And here was where Nagano really shone, welding the disparate elements of this multi-sectioned movement into a convincing, unified whole.
The orchestra were magnificent throughout. If the conductor's interpretation had come up to the standard of his final movement all the way through, this would have been a Mahler Seventh for the ages.
On March 17 the orchestra and Nagano are performing this symphony in Mahler's home hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, and it will be live-streamed on www.medeci.tv. Personally, I would really be interested to hear how the Vienna critics respond to Nagano's very idiosyncratic interpretation.
No comments:
Post a Comment