Proms 2009: Mahler's unfinished rhapsody

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Many conductors refuse to touch Cooke’s Mahler. Riccardo Chailly embraces it; his performance with the Gewandhaus Orchestra fully justified his faith.

Holding every section of the orchestra in perfect balance, Chailly achieved a miraculous abundance of detail. At times the brass resembled a celestial organ, while the opening movement's piercing trumpet solos seemed to awaken ghosts hidden in the Albert Hall’s rafters. Later, the fourth movement’s stuttering waltz grew ever more tormented until a finely weighted flute solo brought temporary balm, while the bass drum’s shattering blows shook the building’s foundations.

Yet the tiniest sounds — a shudder of cymbal, a single plucked harp string — contained a world of feeling. The work closed as gently as a feather floating on a cushion of air, Chailly holding the final silence as if defying us to break it.

The Gewandhaus Orchestra has a special relationship with Felix Mendelssohn, who was its music director for the last years of his life. In his First Piano Concerto, the young Palestinian-Israeli pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar fully endorsed Mendelssohn’s instruction that the opening should be played "with fire", and if the result was an occasional hardness in the piano’s tone, there were also moments of contemplative searching. The orchestra, meanwhile, was a steely fist in a silken glove.

www.bbc.co.uk/proms

Mahler's Tenth: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Chailly
Royal Albert Hall