CityLife

The Hallé and BBC Philharmonic: Latry, Mahler

Symphony Of A Thousand
Bridgewater Hall
May 2, 2010

It was the big one. Mahler’s ‘Symphony of a thousand’ – in practice, the symphony of just-over-half-a-thousand, but pretty spectacular nonetheless – performed jointly by the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic, with an army of choral singers, in the joint series marking the composer’s 150th birthday.

Sold out for months, the concert had its own sense of expectancy, with an ovation at the beginning simply for our own organ virtuoso Jonathan Scott, who came on, microphone in hand, as the warm-up man for the organist of Notre-Dame in Paris, Olivier Latry.

When M. Latry embarked on his 20-minute improvisation on the plainchant theme of Veni Creator Spiritus, it was clear that his role, as he saw it, was at least partly to explore the enormous range of colours available from the Bridgewater Hall’s Marcussen organ, including a striking exploitation of the lower range of the mutation stops.

His harmonic language owes much to Messiaen, and he is extraordinarily fond of building his textures on ostinati, with exciting-sounding results.

After one man controlling 5,500 pipes, it was down to one man to control 500-plus performers, in Mahler’s eight symphony. And the challenge facing Sir Mark Elder was not merely to co-ordinate those vast forces and

harness the huge sound they could make, but to deliver a musical result out of it all.

The eighth, is after all, a one-off among the Mahler symphonies, with almost none of the structural cohesion we think of as ‘symphonic’. It’s really a big cantata followed by a quasi-operatic scene, but it’s packed with counterpoint and telling details which must emerge from the swirl of sound.

Sir Mark’s instincts are always theatrical, and they served him well here. He burst into the opening (‘impetuoso’, as it says in the score), and never let up on fundamental impetus.

Mahler’s writing for double chorus is masterly, and the singers – the Hallé Choir, CBSO Chorus, Hallé Youth Choir and Hallé Children’s Choir – had the capacity to produce tone varying from thunder to a whisper.

Articulation – and even a little characterisation in the more combative lines of the Veni Creator words – was emphatic, and later on the young singers’ line rang through the musical tapestry like a golden thread. 

The soloists were a magnificent team: none more so than tenor Peter Hoare and soprano Claire Rutter in their roles in the Faust scene, it seemed to me, but there were glorious sounds likewise from Aga Mikolaj,

Sarah Connolly, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Gerald Finley and James Cresswell. Anita Watson, taking Anna Leese’s place at short notice as the celestial Mater Gloriosa, completed the ensemble.

The combined orchestral forces, led by Yuri Torchinsky, gelled magnificently together with only momentary hints of uncertainty, and the celestial sounds (strings, harps, harmonium, etc) were delicately and effectively blended. 

In the end it was the cumulative effect of the final pages that mattered more than anything. Sir Mark made every change of pace and dynamic tell, with drama ever to the fore, and there was still something special left for the final chords. It was a cosmic moment.

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