Ten days ago, Sakari Oramo took over a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert at short notice to conduct Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. But his major Mahler commitment with the BBCSO at this summer’s Proms was always going to be an even more massive symphony, the Third, a performance that also involved the upper voices of the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Trinity Boys Choir and the mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt.
By their sheer scale alone, performances of Mahler’s Third are always special events; some of those, conducted by Claudio Abbado (twice) and Bernard Haitink, rank among the most memorable concerts I’ve been lucky enough to attend. Fine as it was, Oramo’s account didn’t quite come into that special category, lacking Abbado’s ecstatic intensity and Haitink’s epic sweep, but it was impressive in its own right, superbly played by the BBCSO, with the brass in particular outstanding, though the vagaries of the Albert Hall acoustics, with a few new eccentricities apparently added this year, were sometimes distracting.
Coming in at around 95 minutes in a work that can easily last over 100, Oramo’s performance was on the swift side. But nothing ever seemed rushed or forced, though there was a real snarl and snap to the martial episodes of the huge first movement. The dreamy post horn solos that interrupt the third-movement scherzo were given plenty of space, while the cool-toned Carlstedt was allowed to make the Nietzsche setting of the fourth a moment of wondering reflection; the great paragraphs of the finale, part hymn, part apotheosis, were unfolded with unwavering certainty.
After the Mahler there was something that has become too much of a rarity under the current Proms regime, a late-night programme of smaller-scale contemporary music. This one was given by the Manchester Collective, who presented a typically eclectic sequence of pieces. It began with two works combining electronic and pre-recorded sounds, Hannah Peel’s shimmering Neon and Ben Nobuto’s joyously witty and bewilderingly discursive SERENITY 2.0, and then contrasted Oliver Leith’s quirky string arrangement of a 17th-century fantasy by Matthew Locke and the seventh of David Lang’s fragile solo-violin Mystery Sonatas, beautifully played by Rakhi Singh, with Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, in which the six members of the collective were paired with pre-recorded versions of themselves. A wonderful contrast in every respect to the great symphony before it.
Both concerts available on BBC Sounds until 9 October. The Proms continue until 9 September
