Simon Rattle takes the LSO on a remarkable Romantic odyssey
Classical Lso/rattle Barbican
Simon Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra and Gustav Mahler’s great song of farewell to life, Das Lied von der Erde: it’s an enticing combination. Rattle knows Mahler inside-out; he famously conducted all nine symphonies while still a student, and now brings a seasoned mastery to the task of shaping Mahler’s giant narratives. Add Simon O’neill, the tenor, and Christian Gerhaher, the baritone, as the two soloists, and you have practically a dream ticket.
The opening of the first song, Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery, certainly had the right despairing exaltation, and Simon O’neill flung it off with a winning abandon, but he wasn’t in best voice. To say he seemed under strain might seem silly – what tenor isn’t under strain, pitted at the top of his range against Mahler’s huge orchestra? – but it was noticeable that only in the humorous light moments in The Drunkard in Spring did O’neill really shine.
As for Gerhaher, he was a marvel throughout, beginning in The Lonely One in Autumn with daring, almost folk-like casualness. He did everything with the lightest touch, as if he were in a room with one piano and a few friends for an audience. Towards the end of the last song Abschied (Farewell), when he finally conjured a big heartfelt sound, the effect was heart-stopping.
Add to that the fact that orchestra was on terrific form, conjuring in the song Beauty a sound of almost unbearable brightness – like the glitter of sun on sea – and you have what ought to have been a near-ideal combination of qualities. And yet the performance wasn’t the poignant experience it should have been. The problem lay in the long final Farewell. One needs to feel that the singer’s final acceptance of life’s transience is the culmination of a difficult emotional journey, but Rattle was so concerned to craft each stage with maximum distinctiveness that the sense of the whole was lost.
Much more successful on that level was the performance of Metamorphosen, Richard Strauss’s moving farewell to the Germanic culture that had once nurtured him and now (in 1945) lay in ruins. Its sheer length and highly-wrought intricacy make it difficult to play, and a challenge to listen to. Here, the virtuoso playing of the LSO strings made sure every thread in Strauss’s luxuriant brocade was visible, and Rattle’s sure guiding hand made the ending feel like the end of everything.
Hear this concert on the BBC iplayer for 30 days bbc.co.uk/radio3 The concert is repeated on Dec 17; 020 7638 8891