CityLife

BBC Philharmonic: Payne, Mahler

BBC Philharmonic
Bridgewater Hall
June 5, 2010

Mahler's tenth symphony was never finished by the composer, and so, as Deryck Cooke, the originator of the generally used performing version, acknowledged, the best you can offer is the realisation of a draft.

We shall never know what Mahler would have finally done with it – and yet there is an incredibly moving effect to be gained from hearing the thoughts he had written. Structurally, they seem complete and express a journey that ends in a reconciliation of sorrow and love that, in the right hands, can move one to tears.

Those right hands were there as Gianandrea Noseda guided the BBC Philharmonic through the music. He caught the sense of infinite sadness even in the first movement, in the mellow sounds which follow the darkness of the huge discord which is its fulcrum.

The scherzo movement was not quite as clinically precise as we have grown to expect from the Phil under Noseda, but energy and brilliance were there – maybe the hot weather took its toll on the possibility of real enjoyment.

But in the final two movements Noseda and his players plumbed the depths of the anguish and eery gloom that come before Mahler’s final and glorious music of redemption through tenderness, and brought the symphony – and the whole Manchester cycle – to a radiant, though whispered, end. The silence that followed spoke volumes.

The new work preceding Mahler was Anthony Payne’s The Period Of Cosmographie, which employs an orchestra almost as big as Mahler’s to evoke a cold Icelandic landscape – at beginning and end quite film-score-like in its static graphicness.

In between, though, there’s plenty going on, with bellowing horns and an intermittent contribution from the bass drum that the composer calls ‘seismic’ (I expect he had to finish it before getting the chance to put in a musical version of an ash cloud). It was highly effective in orchestral colour and scene-painting: a tone poem for our time.

Of the nine world premieres I’ve heard in the Manchester Mahler cycle I would put it pretty high up in order of appeal. Not at the top: that still belongs to Friedrich Cerha’s Like A Tragicomedy, with Kurt Schwertsik’s Nachtmusiken and Edward Gregson’s Dream Song close behind.