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One of the world's finest youth orchestras excels in a programme of mostly 20th Century music.
This programme spread its targets wide – Ligeti-lovers looking forward to the ENO's staging of Le Grand Macabre, those sad creatures for whom the sound track to 2001: A Space Odyssey is 'all they know, or all they need to know' of classical music; Mahlerians, Schoenbergians and those for whom Matthias Goerne is the gold standard amongst baritones. I'm afraid I only fall into two of these categories, but such was the standard of much of the performance that the whole evening was worthwhile.
The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester has some superb players, and Jonathan Nott knew exactly how to get the best out of them – always encouraging, always coaxing yet never domineering, his Atmosphères was as persuasive an account of Ligeti's micropolyphony as I have heard, skilfully evoking the fragile textures of the music and its complexities.
I imagine that the insertion of Kindertotenlieder between the Ligeti and the Schoenberg was meant to be for 'light relief' in the harmonic sense, but it would have made a more logical pairing for the Five Orchestral Pieces to have come after the Ligeti. I've always relished the dichotomy between Schoenberg's statement (to Strauss) that the pieces are 'without architecture, without structure' when in fact the work as a whole it is one of the 20th Century's most precisely structured compositions. The players were especially eloquent in Nos. 3 and 5, the former finely evoking the 'Summer Morning by a Lake.'
It takes true greatness to produce a performance as lyrical, dignified, introspective and elegiac as Matthias Goerne's Kindertotenlieder in such a vast hall: instead of the dramatic bluster towards which this work can tend, we felt as if its harrowing reflections were uttered for each of us alone. In the first song, the finality of the deaths is slowly realized by the poet – 'Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt' usually given almost triumphantly, here was sung as if he were reluctant to praise the sun.
In 'Nun seh' ich wohl,' the high-lying lines were sung with unbroken legato, the words 'Leuchten' and 'Sterne' heartbreaking in their intensity. 'In diesem Wetter' found singer and orchestra in perfect fusion, the mood one of dignity and numbed resignation – 'Sie ruh'n wie in der Mutter Haus!' can hardly ever have been sung with such intimate candour.
Also sprach Zarathustra concluded the concert – of course it's the beginning everyone knows, but Nott and the orchestra made an eloquent case for the whole, especially the Wagnerian parodies and the 'Dance Song.' As with the other works in the programme, Strauss' great tone poem has been surprisingly infrequently presented at the Proms – perhaps orchestras and promoters are nervous of it, but this performance showed that they have no need to be.
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