Haitink’s patrician wisdom does Mahler justice
Lso/haitink
Bernard Haitink’s remarkable Indian summer shows no sign of waning. In the first of three concerts he is conducting with the London Symphony Orchestra between now and next week, the 88-year-old Dutch maestro made no concessions to age, apart from sitting down briefly between the massive movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
However valedictory the tone of this masterpiece – a work that aroused all Mahler’s own superstitions – this was not an old-man’s performance but an interpretation of accumulated wisdom. In fact, it was a concert embracing all ages, and dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Manchester attack: in the words of Gareth Davies, the LSO’S principal flautist and chairman, “Where words fail, music speaks”.
But as part of what might be called Mahler’s trilogy of farewell, the Ninth unquestionably exudes visionary power and represents the composer at his most modern. Haitink caught its inexorability from the start, coming closer than many to that spirit the work’s original conductor, Bruno Walter, evoked in its first recording made in Vienna before the Second world War. Here, as there, a rawness in the playing spoke not of unpolished musicianship but perhaps of ragged emotion.
The halting rhythms that Leonard Bernstein ascribed to the faltering pulse of Mahler’s own irregular heart registered here before Haitink steadied them into a funeral marchlike tread. But he also showed himself alert to Mahler’s highly original sonorities: this was the composer who elevated the harp above decorative duties to make it toll like a muted bell.
After playing that had at times sounded deliberately hazy, the second movement brought vivid focus. Even though he was revisiting his beloved Landlër, this is not simply a case of Mahler exploring the same dance forms and Haitink ensured these folk dances sound anything but genial. He drew galumphing accents from the orchestra and orchestra found the defiant tone of third movement.
Real warmth arrived only in the finale, an Adagio full of spiritual feeling. The chorale-like opening brought forth the most upholstered string sound of the evening, but Haitink also ensured the players captured the music’s other-worldly transcendence. A searing performance, albeit one achieved with economy of gesture, this showed again how Haitink is one of the last patricians of the podium.