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.
