BBC Philharmonic Orchestra – Mahler Symphony No. 9 – Live Review

Saturday 12 April 2025

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

*****

Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: A Life-Affirming Farewell?

In an article in The Guardian, Tom Service described the final page of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as ‘one of the most famously death-haunted places in orchestral music’. As he pointed out, the final bar is even marked ‘esterbend’ (dying or dying away). There are other references to death scattered all over the symphony. Mahler wrote ‘Leb’ wohl’ (farewell) above a motif in the first movement in the draft score. This motif recalls ‘Der Abschied’ (The Farewell) from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), written around the same time as the symphony. The composer Alban Berg wrote, ‘The entire [first] movement is based on a presentiment of death’, and the symphony’s first conductor Bruno Walter wrote the word ‘farewell’ could have been written ‘at the head of the Ninth.’ The final movement quotes music from Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children).

Tom Service also wrote that Leonard Bernstein, and many other conductors and listeners, saw the symphony as representing a ‘whole suite of deaths.’ This was Mahler’s last completed symphony. He was aware that Beethoven and Bruckner had died after writing their ninth symphonies, and created a superstition later called the curse of the ninth. He thought he had cheated it by renaming his true ninth symphony Das Lied von der Erde. He had also lost his four-year-old daughter Maria, who died in 1907 of scarlet fever. He had been diagnosed with an incurable heart condition in the same year, which probably led to his early death at the age of 50 in 1911. He failed to hear his Ninth Symphony, which he completed in 1910, but was not premiered until 1912. Service also refers to the death of tonality, which Mahler’s late work certainly prefigures, and also the ‘death throes of the figure of artist as hero in European culture.’

But having skilfully set up the case for the prosecution, Service comes to the symphony’s defence as a life-affirming work despite all the difficulties Mahler was suffering, or perhaps because of them. Those looking for musical clues should consider that the first movement’s sighing, falling theme that provides so much of the material of the symphony is based on a waltz by Johann Strauss, with the delightfully unambiguous title ‘Enjoy Life.’  Jo Kirkbride, in her programme note, whilst acknowledging the symphony is about death, is on the same side as Service, pointing to a letter Mahler wrote to Bruno Walter in 1909 in which he said,

 ‘I have more thirst for life than ever, and find the “habits of existence” sweeter than ever.’

The Israeli-American conductor Yoel Gamzou, who conducted the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday, is known as a Mahler specialist. He was inspired to become a conductor as a boy when he heard Mahler’s music. He studied privately with the great Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, who recorded Mahler’s Ninth in 1994. In 2006, Gamzou founded his own International Mahler Orchestra. A composer as well as a conductor, in 2010, he achieved something Mahler himself never did – the completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. The depth of his knowledge was revealed by his ability to draw out incredible detail from the orchestra, who played superbly for him on Saturday. His conducting was expressive, dramatic, and demonstrative, with large and passionate gestures, often pointing imperiously at individual players or sections, and moving lithely on the podium. So it was remarkable that at the end of the final movement his gestures became more and more subtle and delicate. He held the orchestra – and a rapt audience – in his hands. He very deliberately closed his score at the end, holding everyone in the hall in reverential silence for what seemed like an age.

So what was Gamzou’s view of the symphony? In the first movement, he brought out the piece’s drama, with immense climaxes and easily drew out all the densely complex lines. There was occasional respite from the opaque strands of sound, even optimism and joy, and a lovely ending, suggesting a bucolic, gentle scene.

Mahler’s title for the second movement is very specific, ‘Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb’ (In the tempo of an easy-going country waltz. Somewhat clumsy and very rough). The movement is based on the Ländler, a European folk dance of which Mahler was particularly fond. In a memorable phrase, Robert Philip described how three versions of the dance try to establish themselves simultaneously, ‘as if a drunk is assailed by conflicting images of the dancers.’ Gamzou achieved the feat of bringing out the coarseness of the music, but paradoxically with great precision. At the end of the movement, there was a fiercely dramatic, dark section of what felt like sarcastic joy, which could have come from a symphony with Shostakovich, who owed a debt to Mahler. The movement fell away in sadness, as if the folk dancers, now defeated, were disappearing from the stage.

The music of Shostakovich was prefigured even more obviously in the third movement, which Mahler described as a ‘Rondo-Burleske’. In case that hinted at excess jolliness, he also marked it ‘Sehr trotzig’ (Very defiant). Gamzou brought out all the sarcasm of the movement with a fiercely frenetic opening, with a theme that soon got lost in a morass of sound. He danced on the podium, recalling another conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, the great Yan Pascal Tortelier. The movement was at once life-affirming and troubling. The trumpet solo, which provides one of the musical fragments on which the final movement is based, provided a glimpse of serenity, before angular, Shostakovichian woodwinds destroyed the mood. Depending on which theory you follow, the movement could be a celebration of life’s visceral, thrilling, but unsettling nature, or a sarcastic dismissal of a life that is shortly to be left behind.

As Service wrote, an essential clue to a conductor’s interpretation is their approach to the final movement, which he wittily described as ‘cataclysmically slow.’ Mahler’s description is clear. ‘Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend’(Very slow and even held back). Bruno Walter’s 1938 recording lasted just over 18 minutes, whereas Bernstein stretched the movement to 30 minutes. Gamzou’s performance lasted 28 minutes, putting him firmly at the Bernstein end of things, and perhaps emphasising the movement’s valedictory nature. Equally, the movement can be seen as a hymn to life, possibly highlighted by the sometimes gut-wrenching intensity of the orchestra’s stunning playing. Even the musical quotation from Kindertotenlieder is ambiguous. The song’s words describe how, ‘Im Sonnenschein der Tag ist schön’ (In the sunlight, the day is beautiful). We could take this at face value, describing the subtle joy that life brings, or we could remember that in the original song, the words describe how the protagonist thinks that the children have merely run ahead into the sunshine during a summer walk, and that they will appear around the next corner, a terrible affirmation of the inevitability of death.

Whatever your interpretation is of the final movement – and the symphony as a whole – the playing at the end was profoundly moving. There was a lovely portamento from the strings as if they could not let go of the notes. After a gorgeous cello solo, the strings crept back in. There was a beautifully-controlled pianissimo with a never-ending melody, and one last rousing of the second violin theme before the orchestra fell into silence.

Repertoire

Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 9 in D major

Performers

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Yoel Gamzou Conductor

Sources

Tom Service, Symphony Guide: Mahler’s Ninth (The Guardian 29 July 2014)
Jo Kirkbride Programme Note for BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Robert Philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music (Yale University Press,  Kindle Edition)

This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 19.30 on Tuesday 8 July and will be available for 30 days after broadcast on BBC Sounds