The sheer scale and ambition of Mahler’s symphonies make them ideal works for special occasions; performances become events, and the finest of them seem to lodge in the mind more vividly perhaps than those of any other composer. And just as Sakari Oramo’s account of Mahler’s Third Symphony 10 days ago had evoked memories of earlier great accounts of that sprawling work, so Simon Rattle, conducting the Ninth Symphony in his final concert in the UK as the London Symphony Orchestra’s music director, invited comparisons with the outstanding performances of that work we have been privileged to hear in London over the years.
The Ninth is a conscious work of farewell, a journey from fierce resistance to mortality to a final conditional acceptance of its inevitability, and that trajectory was traced out with massive assurance in Rattle’s performance. There was no mistaking the anger and frustration fuelling the great surging paragraphs of the first movement, played with fabulous richness and accuracy by the LSO, or the take-it-or-leave-it coarseness of the Ländler that followed, while the kaleidoscope of ideas in the Rondo-Burleske became a manic dance of death. The great Adagio finale was then unfolded with wonderful tenderness and care. Where the Rattle of a few years ago might have micromanaged its long phrases, intent on interpreting every detail, there was much more sense here of his standing back and viewing the movement as a whole – allowing the music to follow its own course, while knowing exactly what its ultimate destination was. The final whispered pages, with a packed Albert Hall hanging on every note in utter silence, were magical.
When he had conducted Mahler’s Seventh at the Barbican four months ago, Rattle invited the then threatened BBC Singers to preface the symphony with a performance of Poulenc’s Figure Humaine. He did the same here; the impact of the impassioned and defiant unaccompanied cantata was inevitably more diluted in the expanses of the Albert Hall, and the exceptional performance of the symphony that followed rather overwhelmed it, but the performance by the now temporarily reprieved Singers was as expert and vehement as anyone could want.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 9 October. The Proms continue until 9 September
