Mahler had been dead for just 10 years when, in 1921, his Fourth Symphony was arranged for chamber ensemble by Schönberg’s pupil and assistant, Erwin Stein, to be played at one of their weekly Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The least monumental of the symphonies, though still clearly long, it lent itself well to being scaled down, with each of the 14 instruments plus soprano in the last movement treated as soloists and the listener being given a new aural perspective on even the most familiar passages.
In the hands of the top players that David Adams and Alice Neary bring together for their annual Penarth festival, the clarity and eloquence both of Mahler’s flowing contrapuntal writing and of his harmonies seemed to emerge newly minted. Schönberg himself had conducted that first concert; here, Ryan Bancroft was a quietly animated presence, alert to the teeming detail and to the irresistibly dancing lilt. Yet, in what is sometimes only characterised as the child-like innocence of this symphony, lurks the grim reaper figure, said to have been inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s self-portrait, the scordatura mis-tuning of the violin giving death’s devilish waltz its grotesque edge. And even in the last movement’s setting of Das Himmlische Leben from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, always Mahler’s conscious destination for the work, the litany of saints have a delicious touch of anarchy about them. Soprano Rebecca Evans captured both the mischievous excitability of the child’s vision of heaven and also the ethereal joy.
