Mahler’s farewell and Rattle’s last bow

Sir Simon Rattle finished his tenure as the Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra last night with one of the most moving concert experiences you will find in the world of classical music today. Such statements as the one I have just made are easy to come by today, in a world of twenty-four hour entertainment, even among the plethora of emotive advertising which surrounds the concert programmes of the main British orchestras. But Rattle did what few conductors, and indeed few musicians are truly able to do so plaintively and viscerally to the packed Albert Hall: he seemed to lay bare his soul, his wonderful players marking a true imprint on the music they were playing and the audience they silenced.

Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the last work the composer completed, was the set-piece occasion. For the second time this year, though, Rattle preceded it with Poulenc’s vocal masterpiece, the Figure humaine.

Significantly, it was sung by the BBC Singers. Debates about their continuing status will continue, and the future of the country’s only full-time professional choir may still not end up being as long as the Prommers of last night (and hundreds of thousands listening at home) will have hoped. The viability of such a financial model is daily questioned by the sheer excellence of choirs such as The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen and Tenebrae, all of which continue to function with demanding and pioneering programmes of music which never fail in technical mastery. The same unfortunately cannot always be said for the BBC Singers. Last night, however, their performance of Poulenc’s set of eight songs, one of the most difficult pieces ever composed for voices, was magnificent.

Poulenc’s setting of poems by Paul Éluard was written in 1943, and the momentum of the whole collection heads towards the final exultation of one word: “Liberté”. The work is replete with Poulenc’s joyous harmonic writing and vivid text setting. The singing of the sopranos and altos in the front row of the Singers was exemplary, and fully caught the tone of poignancy and energy, sincerity and momentum, which characterises the best elements of this music. For anyone wondering where to start with the eclectic Poulenc — one of the last century’s most misunderstood and in some ways neglected great composers — there are few better places.

Rattle’s vocal conducting is a rather strange sight to behold, especially in such powerful music as this: the absence of the baton strips him of some necessary rigour and clarity. In comparison with, say, Edward Gardner of the London Philharmonic, Rattle is not at his best with an a capella choir in front of him, although his eccentricity took little away from a truly fine rendition of these wonderful songs.

Yet the night really did belong to Mahler. He is a composer to whom Rattle has returned again and again, a composer whose position at the tail end of the Viennese symphonic tradition is built up by layers of meaning and emotion, neurosis and symbolism. His Ninth Symphony is in many ways a farewell, a Leb’ wohl, not only to his life, but also to the tradition and style of music of which he was such a celebrated conductor in his lifetime. In Rattle’s hands, it took on a level of intensity, of sheer blinding emotion and power which justifies a series like the Proms, with its variety of hits-and-misses, its repeats of old favourites and wacky premieres. This was simply a music-making experience at its most profound and its most honest.

The Ninth is a difficult work with which to get to grips. Its extremely lengthy first movement seems to return ceaselessly to the same material, played with such tenderness by the upper strings of the LPO. Rattle’s conducting was, as has been true of all his best performances, at once almost childlike in its joy and truly mature in his sense of line and colour. He reached such a pitch of emotion at the height of the development section that the end of the movement brought a sense of calm and relief over the Albert Hall, with the conductor mopping of his brow and taking time out to chat to his second violins and recuperate.

It is worth investigating what makes Rattle’s conducting the experience it is — what made last night’s concert so awe-inspiring. Rattle waves his arms about passionately and a wonderful sound comes from the players in front of him — but have these two activities anything to do with each other? I think they do. This is not just because Rattle has made this repertoire his own throughout his career, and because the LPO has such a clear affinity with his style and approach. It is also because they both brought a new life and a sense of possibility to each phrase and even to each note, something that only such high-class combinations as this are able to produce.

Last night we saw an ageing conductor — the wunderkind is now 68 — in full flow, tensely pacing up and down his podium, frantically motioning at his string section and with a juddering jaw expressing all the anguish that Mahler threw into his extraordinary score, and to see the huge orchestral forces fully involved in the rich sound they were making. It had all the trimmings of the music-as-worship that we have come to expect from performances of Mahler and the symphonic greats. But this was more than the ego-fest of a maestro making his grand farewell. In the incredible final movement, where the strings utter a shuddering, halting, revelatory theme which seems to approach an unattainable finish, it was possible to grasp the feeling Mahler was searching for in his musical farewell. This was one playing of sincerity above all.

That came through a unique sense of liminality, of being somewhere on the border between the phrases, between each chord and even, in the most exposed sections of the final movement, between each note. It somehow made the distorted tunes, complex structures and great length of this huge piece make something approaching musical sense, to give it a reticence, tenderness and spirit that is so hard to define and even harder to play. Most of all, we could feel something that it is only possible to sense a precious few times in any concertgoer’s life: that not only were the players in full grasp of the music they were performing, and that this music was somehow something of great value, but that we were hearing it as if it were just for us, and carried a message that was its own, that could not be put into words, and which had something in it, however undefined, of life itself.

It is with that pure joy in life itself and the joy of music that Sir Simon Rattle returns to Germany. Only very few can create the kind of musical experience he and his wonderful players gave last night.

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