Mahler’s Seventh Symphony was originally intended as the sole work in this evening’s concert. Such, however, was the outrage over the threat to so many of the UK’s classical music ensembles and companies that the LSO invited the now reprieved BBC Singers to perform Poulenc’s Figure humaine as well, as a gesture of solidarity.
Speaking after the interval, Simon Rattle protested how “the Arts Council’s swingeing cuts in November” and “the proposed vandalism by the BBC” have affected the musical life of this country, angrily inveighing the “political ignorance of what this artform entails” and the “stubborn pride in that ignorance” on the part of those who have wreaked such havoc.
Poulenc’s piece itself carries enormous symbolic resonance. Written in secret under Nazi occupation in 1943-44, and an iconic Resistance work, it sets texts by Paul Éluard for two a cappella six-part choruses. Poulenc initially intended it for French choirs after the Liberation, but given the complexity of its vocal writing, he eventually allocated it to the BBC Singers (known at the time as the BBC Chorus), who gave the first performance in March 1945.
Hearing them sing it is a reminder both of their greatness as an ensemble, and of their centrality as interpreters in musical history. It was done with fierce intelligence and great conviction. Rattle gave the music space for dissonances and detail to register without fracturing tensions or momentum, and the emotional trajectory from quiet anger to the tremendous closing demand for freedom was exactingly and thrillingly plotted.
Mahler’s Seventh was often superb, too. The opening movement was a rollercoaster ride, a thing of jolts, contrasts, mood swings and moments of beauty. Rattle’s attention to detail in Mahler emerged in the central nocturnes and scherzo, swivelling between retro Romantic nostalgia and fragmentary anticipations of the worlds of Schoenberg and Berg: the second Nachtmusik sounded particularly gorgeous here. The bucolic finale can so often seem at a tangent from the rest of the work and did so here, despite the energy Rattle brought to it. The playing was virtuosic in its brilliance throughout.
