Not Only Opera

Someone turn down the brass: Berg and Mahler with the LSO at the Barbican

Berg's Violin Concerto and Mahler's Seventh Symphony
Janine Jansen, Gianandrea Noseda and the London Symphony Orchestra
Barbican Hall
6 April 2017
Circle H84, £10
https://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=19066

I last saw Berg's Violin Concerto under inauspicious circumstances. Unsurprisingly, the piece benefits immeasurably from the excision of the cancerous opera growth it had in Hamburg. Still, this performance at the Barbican also made me appreciate the sole benefit of Hamburg State Opera's performance of the concerto as a coda to Lulu – namely, the orchestra in the pit and the soloist on stage. The balance in the Barbican was poor, and that can probably be attributed to my position in the hall (one level up and far-left next to a wall – the whole concert was basically a brass concerto) as well as Berg, Jansen and Noseda. I think probably about a quarter of the soloist part was inaudible.

That quibble aside, this was an illuminating interpretation. Jansen and Noseda together emphasized the contrasts of Berg's score: she drawing on a gamut of sounds from raw husk to silvery sweetness; he and the orchestra emphatically characterizing each section and managing the bridges between sections with a seamless, exquisite subtlety. It probably wouldn't be to everyone's taste, but it made me hear orchestral effects I've never heard before. The whole performance was aided by the orchestra's excellent ensemble: from an audience perspective it's mystifying how they manage that, looking at Noseda's furious churning, but maybe you had to be at the rehearsals.

Noseda reached new intensities of grunting stomping stamping in the Mahler – fair enough, but I was grateful to be far away from him. The penalty was to be foxed again by that preponderance of brass sound. Of course, you wouldn't want the tenor horn in the opening of Mahler 7 to be anything less than dominant, but this was absurd, if very beautifully played. I realize it is very tedious to keep harping on about the balance, so I'll restrain myself – but know that it grieved me. Aside from the balance, and aside from the grunty stompy stampy activities on the podium, this performance was all to the good. The orchestra was viscerally alive and seething (if the ensemble a bit more impressionistic than in the Berg), and all in all everything was very impressive. But what a bizarre piece! This symphony more than anything else, I think, makes me think Mahler must have been mad: he achieves absolutely magnificence in the first movement, and daringly mixes the breathtaking and the weird in the middle movements, only seemingly to start all over again in the final movement and its Shostakovich-level ironic-or-maybe-not-ironic aggressive triumphalism. Well done Mahler, I suppose, for making something that more than a century later still sounds both obviously great and utterly peculiar.