Mahler in Hamburg - Reconstructed concert programme conducted by Gustav Mahler in Hamburg on 27 January 1893

Beethoven: Egmont overture; Marschner: Aria from Hans Heiling; Adam: Aria from La poupée de Nuremberg; Mendelssohn: The Hebrides overture; Mahler: Six songs from Des knaben Wunderhorn and Symphony No.1 in D 'Titan'
Performers Solveig Kringelborn (soprano); Chrisptopher Maltman (baritone); City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo (conductor)
Venue Usher Hall
Address Lothian Road Edinburgh
Reviewer Pat Napier

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

When Gustav Mahler was engaged as Hamburg's Director of Opera, his compositions were hardly known, even though his first symphony had been composed in 1888. Not surprising! Its first performance in Budapest in 1889 had proved disastrous, partly because of the misleading allusive titles he gave to its movements, which confused and puzzled its Philharmonic Society's subscribers. Near disaster struck Mahler again when he contracted cholera and almost died in the few months before conducting the symphony's second performance in Hamburg. He recovered, losing only a remarkable 10 days out of his workload. The ever-pragmatic Mahler's carefully constructed programme was a calculated effort to sell his own music to the independent-thinking Hanseatic city-state's concert-goers.

Kowing that his song cycle Des knaben Wunderhorn would need gifted soloists, this 'Popular concert in Philharmonic style' programme offered his audience two well-loved overtures enclosing two showpiece arias from operas with which he'd had earlier conducting successes elsewhere in 1883 and 1885 respectively. Neither piece has survived into today's repertoire. Solveig Kringelborn sang the aria from Hans Heiling with delightful expression but her voice did not cope well with its demands. Both this and her Wunderhorn songs missed out several stanzas. By contrast, Christopher Maltman was in very fine form. His aria from La poupée de Nuremberg by the Parisian Adolphe Charles Adam was a brilliant, jolly piece celebrating the joys and pleasures of youth, full of contrast and humour.

Having put his audience into a good humour, it was then time for Mahler to lay bare his whole being in this, the first of his two symphonies, in which he confessed that "My whole life is contained in them: I have set down in them my experience and suffering..." But, first, the way would be prepared by some songs from Des knaben Wunderhorn, composed four years earlier and which would provide rich source material for the symphony's instrumentation and orchestration. They contained military music, varied scoring, Ländler, folk music all interspesed with chamber style music. Again, Kringelborn under-performed while Maltman was the embodiment of the rejecting lad, the sentinel, the hussar. Rheinlegendchen was just as successful today as it had been then.

However, it was the symphony which was the centrepiece of the programme. In its original version, which included the short, expressive Blumine and all the repeats, (the revised vesion was not to be completed for another three years) it achieved a standing ovation from its large Hamburg audience. Sakari Oramo, making his Festival debut, took the CBSO to exciting new heights. His obviously-deep love for music poured out in his interpretation, his orchestral balance, his tender lyrical passages contrasting with contradictory bursts of raw passion and pain. In the symphony, the delicate, dawn clarinet opening and the off stage trumpets set the scene in their advance towards the brilliant clash of full sunrise cymbals signalling wonders to come. At last, in the final movement, the terrifying horrors of the Inferno rolled out in almost-unbearably tormented, screaming brass, which yielded to a triumphal march, then climaxing in an unforgettable bank of eight horns, one trumpet and one trombone standing to emphasise and direct an exultant full-on orchestral paradise in the opening D major melody. Oramo richly deserved - and got - the same rapturous acclaim which Mahler won in the oginal programme.

© Pat Napier. 15 August 2001