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Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Gatti

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Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
The South Bank Centre,Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX

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Description: Daniele Gatti conducts the orchestra in Mozart's Symphony No 41: Jupiter and Beethoven's Symphony No 9 In D Minor, Op 125: Choral.

Phone: 0871663 2500
Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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Mahler's dance of death misses the heartstrings

 

First time: Daniele Gatti

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Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the last he completed, is unequivocally about death. By the time it was finished, in 1911, he had had four years to come to terms with the diagnosis of his terminal heart condition. He died the same year.

A result of the Ninth’s prolonged gestation (it was begun in 1908, composed mostly in 1909 and completed too late to be performed before Mahler’s death) is that it became a vehicle for contradictory feelings about mortality. The first movement in particular speaks eloquently of his angry despair. Other sections, especially the nobly elegiac finale, express a sense of calm resignation, opening the way for the wide variety of interpretations.

In the first movement of his performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Daniele Gatti established a measured tread, reasonably enough in a movement whose opening section is marked “leisurely”. Whether the continuation of the movement, an emotional struggle of epic proportions, quite emerged in those terms is less certain.

There was a palpable lack of bite in the orchestral playing, despite some very decent solo and ensemble work. Doubts continued in the second-movement Ländler, a clod-hopping peasant dance, coarse in manner. Or so it is marked, though Gatti’s deliberate phrasing and articulation did not quite catch the sense of hollow vulgarity that Mahler intended. Later in the movement he projected a character that was almost playful rather than uncouth, surely a novel interpretation.

Mahler’s third movement, a Rondo-Burleske of a quite strident nature, similarly failed to come across with the necessary vehemence. The cartoonish passages were neatly realised, even eliciting a faint chuckle in the attentive audience but the coda, impressively delivered by the RPO, emerged as a virtuoso orchestral showpiece rather than the outburst of savage, world-weary mockery that Mahler actually wrote.

And so to that profoundly moving slow finale, the high point of Gatti’s reading, even if it left nagging doubts. As the consoling music of the main, hymn-like theme returned again and again, he raised the emotional temperature, reaching a peak of intensity at the central climax.

But the noble hymn turned into a celebration of life. Valid as that might seem in the circumstances, it lacked a sense of pathos. The interludes had a celestial air and the coda was drawn out expressively but ultimately this reading failed to tug sufficiently at the heartstrings. You don’t have to be a devotee of Bernstein’s self-lacerating approach to feel that something was missing.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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