Schubert’s pompous Ninth benefits from a little romance
LSO: Berg and Schubert LSO St Luke’s ★★★★☆
Every critic has their blind spots, and for me Schubert’s final symphony, his Ninth, is one. The piece’s nickname, “Great”, is practically a command to accept its masterpiece status, but the work’s enormous length seems anything but heavenly. All that parade-ground pomposity, all those repetitions, and that endless tiddely-pom, tiddely-pom rhythm in the strings in the finale
– it’s the musical equivalent of the brainfever bird’s maddening call.
Still there’s always the hope that a performance will come along that makes the scales fall from my eyes. Thursday night’s from the LSO under Simon Rattle didn’t manage it, but it did make the moments of romantic mystery stand out in sharp relief. The opening horn melody was deliberately quiet and modest, in contrast to the heroic tone many orchestras strike. The long trombone melody later in the first movement was also surprisingly quiet, almost fading into the background. This paradoxically had the effect of magnifying its epic quality, the way mountains seen through mist appear grander than in full daylight.
Throughout, there were numerous examples of beautifully moulded, sensitive playing from the LSO’S principal players, above all oboist Juliana Koch and clarinettist Chris Richards. And Rattle’s subtle tempo inflections softened the work’s monumental quality, especially in the Scherzo. Here the rat-a-tat vigour of the opening was nicely offset by his fractionally slower tempo for the violin’s delicious, up-curving melody.
The work that preceded it, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, has always been in my personal pantheon of masterpieces. It was written in 1935 in memory of the teenage daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, and is full of moments of anguish and protest. In this performance, those moments told with maximum force, thanks in large part to the stunning Greek virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos. He can summon an immense tone, and had no trouble soaring over the angry outbursts of the orchestra in the despairing second movement.
Up to that moment, the performance was unusually dark, the fleeting waltz-like moments sarcastic rather than charming. This meant that when the music turned to a more consoling mood with a nostalgic Carinthian folk-tune, it was all the more moving. Berg’s quotation of a hymn-harmonisation by Bach floated in tenderly, and at the end Kavakos ascended to an impossibly high note over radiant harmonies, placed exquisitely by Rattle and the orchestra. It was as rapturous an image of transcendence as you could hope for.
Watch this concert for free until Thursday at lso.co.uk