MAHLER Symphony No 6 (Rattle)
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Gustav Mahler
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: Berlin Philharmoniker
Magazine Review Date: 02/2019
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 161
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: BPHR180231
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Symphony No. 6 |
Gustav Mahler, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Gustav Mahler, Composer Simon Rattle, Conductor |
Author: Peter Quantrill
Spliced between interviews with Rattle and Berlin musicians is rehearsal footage mostly drawn from Rattle’s recent, belated coming to terms with the Eighth Symphony of Bruckner. He struggles to secure ensemble as well as a rapt yet fluid unfolding of the Adagio’s main theme. ‘I was after something more Classical’, he confesses later.
It’s a struggle of identities, personal and collective, writ large in the opening of Mahler’s Sixth. A retired cellist vividly recalls how the Berlin bass used to grow into the chord rather than making a clean attack: ‘this is Stravinsky, not Brahms’. That’s how they did it in 1987, spreading like an angry blood clot. By 2018 Rattle has indeed achieved a cleaner attack without denaturing the core of the sound, and at a virtually identical tempo weaving the threads of the argument together, Classical-style, rather than letting them clump in a dense and suffocating mass.
Both performances (each burning with grim conviction, the first marginally more orchestrally infallible than the second) have received previous consideration in these pages: the 1987 in a trial run for the orchestra’s own label (2/07) and the farewell in September 2018. Schulz’s film deserves more attention. ‘You don’t get stabbed in the back here’, says Rattle with the Philharmonie behind him. ‘You get stabbed in full view. And I’ve come to love that – in a weird way.’ No less than they did in a posthumous tribute to Abbado, but therefore all the more remarkably, the musicians analyse their outgoing chief’s strengths and weaknesses – and he theirs – with a candour unimaginable outside what amounts to a self-governing organisation based in what Rattle calls, not without admiration, or perhaps appreciation for its affinity with his native Liverpool, ‘a fantastically bloody-minded city’.
A central sequence encloses a love letter to Haydn and ticks off with pride the orchestra’s innovations in education and communication, nurtured and supported by Rattle. Elsewhere, Schulz lets resonant juxtaposition do the work. ‘It mustn’t be forgotten that we are still a Prussian orchestra’, insists another longstanding cellist, Götz Teutsch. Whereas, observes violist Matthew Hunter, Rattle is ‘the most unconventional conductor you can possibly imagine’. Something of a conscience as well as senior agitator among the orchestra’s ranks in the mould of his predecessor, Werner Thärichen, timpanist Rainer Seegers has a lot of good things to say about Rattle but they all come back, one way or another, to his being an Englishman. And it’s he who acknowledges that, as it did with Abbado, the relationship between maestro and musicians immediately improved when Rattle announced his departure. Will they miss him? As oboist Jonathan Kelly admits, only time will tell.
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