The Halle set a very high standard with Mahler’s Second Symphony a couple of weeks back (you’ll need to scroll down 5 posts should you want to see comments). So the BBC Philharmonic faced quite a challenge with the Third, another  epic soundscape with a passionate philosophical programme behind it.

 But they proved equal to the task, and if the Third didn’t send us out quite as dazed and elated as its predecessor, it was mainly because this symphony, though just as complex, is more contemplative, a slower-paced work with quieter dynamics relying more or mood and melody than on stark contrasts and shattering climaxes.

Vassily Sinaisky took the first movement, with its resounding opening fanfare on the horns representing the great god Pan arriving to reanimate nature after the winter, at a steady but not rapid pace – very much the approach Stenz used last time for the opening of the Second. The brass section was superb throughout, playing with resonance and precision. Just as well because in every movement the brass has vital thematic parts to play, most often to remind us, in some way, of that opening motif of descending horn notes. The first movement as a whole gave an experience of restrained power, deep strings sporadically throbbing and surging, with the brass and the more fragile, fragmentary woodwind floating over the top.

Here’s an extract from the movement (LSO, splendidly conducted by Valery Gergiev, looking more than ever like Boris Karloff):

Mahler’s idea for the symphony was to make it ‘a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world…In my symphony the whole of nature finds a voice.’ The movements aim to layer one tier of being on top of another. The orchestra gave second movement (originally titled ‘What the flowers tell me’) a light, almost staccato touch and brought out the exuberant, dance-like qualities of the third (‘What the animals of the forest tell me’, according to Mahler’s early notes). The distant horns (how Mahler loves those!) sounded here like a faint reminder of the world of men, rather thanan eruption of the animalistic Pan.

Reaching ‘Night’ and the world of men, the 4th movement, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill got her entrance exactly right: the voice seemed to emerge and radiate without an identifiable starting-point, simply welling up out of the orchestral sound, as if uttered by the universe as well as by humanity. This lovely setting of the mysertious Nietzsche poem was a delight.

Mahler’s gentle audacity is astounging and wonderful:  having begun the symphony with Pan, then led on to Nietzsche (who loathed Christianity), he then dances into the fifth movement with a children’s folksong – it sounds almost like a skipping game – about Jesus, St Peter, and God’s forgiveness. And every so often what sounds like a reminiscence of a Bach choral sweeping in to underline the religious elements. The CBSO Youth Chorus made a fine job of the children’s chorus, vigorous and precise, entering with the ‘Bimm bamm…’ of the church bells. Personally I would have liked a bit more volume from them, and I suspect Sinaisky held them back a bit too much; but it wasn’t a major blemish.

The transition to the sixth movement made me see something I’d missed before, listening to the symphony endlessly on disc, which is that having brought Christianity and Gid into the structure, Mahler goes a step further and higher. Where the 2nd symphny ends in song, it’s as if he now sees that words aren’t enough and nothing but pure music will say what he has to say. We’ve gone beyond God too, beyond anything that can be formulated or imagined.

The final movement was wonderful, with that  sense of endlessly-shifting and changing and evolving harmonies as Mahler finds his way very slowly through a vast musical mist, drawing notes out and mutating the harmonies so that you constantly find a chord emerging that’s different from the one you expected, and then that melds into yet another and so on. Sinaiski did a good job with the dynamics here, very slowly building and building the movement until all the layers came together in those vast closing chords that show you the whole imaginable cosmos towering up octave above octave, layer above layer, energised and tranquil but completely alive, like a vast wall of glass or water that doesn’t topple but just settles and poises there, with the brass finally folding harmoniously into the picture and the timpani slowly repeating deep notes that echo the bell-chimes of the children’s song. The combination of energy and peace at the end of the symphony was very impressive. Here’s a clip (Dudamel, La Scala Philharmonic):

I didn’t cry this time (though the girl next to me was in tears throughout the final movement). There’s less melodrama, more serenity in this than in the Second Symphony, but the vision is vaster. Maybe Sinaiski didn’t always make the dynamics as exciting as he might have done. I overheard one departing audience member talking about the difficulty of staying awake, in a way that made me wonder if the work is just too big and complicated to grasp until you’ve heard it over and over again and got all those details into your system. The applause was loud and long but it didn’t really match the reaction to No 2.

Certainly I notice these days how closely-integrated the Third is. The pattern – melodic and rhythmic – of that opening fanfare, for example, comes into just about everything in the work. Sometimes I think Mahler 3 has an entire symphony for its first movement, and a whole other one for its last, with a suite of other things in between. Then again I find myself thinking the entire work is a single movement. The first time you hear it, it’s a sprawl. By the tenth time, you just notice the mind-boggling precision with which it’s all integrated. Very strange. But how wonderful to hear these masterpieces one after another, so well-played. Not sure yet if I’ll make the Fourth on Thursday. Lorraine’s Rueda class at Cuba Cafe is calling, and Amanda is able to dance again now her broken arm has healed. A dilemma. But I’ll post something as soon as I get to another Mahler extravaganza. Meanwhile there’s always salsa and a million other things.
And don’t forget: starting 5 April, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the entire series on consecutive Monday nights at 7 pm. Listen to any you missed and see if you agree with me! And do post your comments.

Well folks, here we are with the fifth and (sadly) definitive version , which is that there will be NO Republic of Salsa in February.  It will happen again on 3 April – resuming the usual first-Saturday-of-alternate-months pattern.

Yet again (sigh) the date for Republic of Salsa (Chorlton Irish Club, Manchester) has been changed. It is now going to be Saturday 20 Feb. I think this is the fourth date I’ve been given but this seems to be definitive. And it is the best Cuban Salsa party going, so let’s hope we can all get there.

I don’t want to leave without giving you more fun than that, so here’s something a bit different. Last night at Pauline’s rueda class (Tuesdays, Spreadeagle, Chorlton, Manchester) I heard some good music on Jordan’s iphone. He told me it was Orquesta de la Luz. Ever heard Japanese salsa? No? Then take a look at this clip, recorded in New York. I guarantee it’ll blow your socks off!

 

That’s all for today. But watch out shortly for posts about the wonderful, rediscovered Ennerdale poet Tom Rawling, and about Anacaona – the song, the woman, and the stories behind the song we all love to dance to!

Here are all the bits and pieces I’ve meant to write about salsa lately! First, an update: the next Salsa Republic at Manchester’s Chorlton Irish Club will be on Saturday 20 February (NOT 6 Feb) – this is because Lorraine got stuck several extra days in Cuba (poor girl!!) owing to snow at Gatwick causing flight cancellations.

Late last year, just before my phone and internet were cut off and the UK disappeared under a blanket of snow, I recorded a piece about salsa for the BBC World Service, in conversation with Miami Cuban Emilio San Pedro. The studio people mixed in a few good tracks and we had some fun. And a few important points about the spirit of salsa were raised.

It seemed a pity for this to disappear for ever – it’s long gone off the BBC i-player – so here it is as an audio file. I hope you’ll enjoy it, if you didn’t hear it first time around. And please feel free to comment!

Conversation with Emilio San Pedro

Meanwhile, Yanet has -sadly – been voted off BBC’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’. She had a bad night last Saturday: she looked exhausted and stressed-out from the moment she started and something was clearly wrong. It was bad luck, too, that the dance she had to do was the Lindy Hop – a dance that’s both very difficult and extremely ungainly. No chance to show off her ballet skills or body isolation there: Lindy Hop makes people bounce around like manic toddlers, without grace or dignity. But there was more to it than that.

My guess is that there were other, personal problems in the background. Yanet, unlike other competitors, was thousands of miles from her family. Moreover, there are special problems about being Cuban – layers of difficulty most of us can’t even imagine, economic, social, political. Being an exiled Cuban doesn’t remove the difficulties, it just changes them a bit. But Yanet will remain a star and her teaching will be in more demand than ever. Let’s forget ‘So You…’ and take a look at her as she is, so often, at her best:

Finally, don’t miss the excellent LATIN MUSIC USA series on BBC 4 TV. It’s at 10 pm Fridays and this week – 5 Feb – they are doing the history of SALSA. The trailers showed the Fania All Stars with Hector Lavoe and Celia Cruz so this is going to be legendary stuff. To make it even better, the programme is immediately followed on the same channel with broadcast of a great live salsa band LA EXCELENSIA playing at the Barbican, and after that is a documentary about Celia Cruz herself. At last someone has come up with a TV channel that’s worth watching! As a preview, here’s a nice, funky, atmospheric clip of La Excelencia:

All this TV won’t turn you into a couch potato, because if last week’s similar viewing on the same channel is anything to go by (history of Latin music up to Santana, followed by salsa Paladium orchestra, followed by documentary on Carmen Miranda) you will be dancing around the room all evening. Enjoy!

Mahler’s Second was bound to be a make-or-break point in the unfolding ‘Mahler in Manchester’ project. The Halle and BBC Philharmonic are playing all ten of the symphonies this year to mark the Mahler centenary, and this was the first of the really big ones.

A couple of weeks ago the BBC Philharmonic gave a lovely performance of No. 1, but it didn’t actually fire me up. I found myself wondering whether maybe I’d just heard it too many times. Or is it that it’s a young man’s piece and sadly it doesn’t quite resonate with me as it used to? I’m sure the fault was mine.

On Thursday, though, there were no such doubts. This was a real, transcendent experience, with everything you could look for: clarity, dynamics, amazing textures, lyrical passion. And, incidentally, a capacity audience. The Bridgewater Hall was full and the atmosphere was charged.

The Second has maybe the most electrifying of all Mahler’s openings: an intense vibrating note on all the upper strings that just rivets your attention until the grumbling, growling basses and cellos start to enter and the whole thing begins to gather momentum like some colossal machine or mountain avalanche. Fascinating and terrifying.

And the melodies! Mahler has an unbelievable fertility in generating one gorgeous tune after another. The melodies just seem to flow out of him: eeerie little folksongs, huge chunky rhythmic patterns reminiscent of Brahms or Beethoven, catchy dance tunes, marches, rhapsodic romantic syrup, postmodern hair-raising discord-patterns, you name it. 

And then he collages and interweaves and overlaps all of this to produce amazing drama – changes of mood, gradual revelations, mystical ecstasy, frightening shocks. It’s all there, and the result is a sound-drama (or movie if you like) that has the range of an epic yet keeps you engaged as if he were writing the soundtrack to your most intimate thoughts.

Speaking of which, I discovered Mahler when I was still at school, on my father’s LP records, and then by luck shared rooms at University with a music student, the conductor Peter Lawson, who was a Mahler fanatic. So I got soaked in the music for a whole year and it went somewhere very deep inside.  And while other kinds of music have set the pace of my life at different times – the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, JJ Cale, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane, Bach, Stravinsky, and for the past few years Salsa in particular, underneath it all Mahler has never gone away. I find myself singing snatches of his music at the oddest moments. It’s like part of my DNA.

Thursday’s performance absolutely lived up to all of this. Markus Stenz took the first movement at a relaxed tempo but he kept it moving with a steady relentless pulse and there wasn’t a slack or dull moment.  The momentum was maintained throughout the symphony and there was a clarity and precision at every point that gave the sense of an orchestra absolutely involved and attentive. The dynamics were interesting too. Stenz, who seemed to be enjoying himself immensely throughout,  brought the harps right up, something I enjoyed because it emphasised one of Mahler’s strangest and most delightful textures.

Susan Gritton (soprano) and Katarina Karneus (mezzo) melted into the heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrics of the last movement with crystalline beauty as well as solid volume. The whole thing was so perfect and felt so natural that the symphony as a whole felt  more like a geological or spiritual phenomenon – two things that aren’t so far apart for Mahler – than a human composition.

The colossal surges of sound and energy in the finale  rolled over us with a huge unanswerable impact.  This was Mahler the visionary, experiencing an apocalyptic resolution – maybe a highly unorthdox Day of Judgment, or maybe all beings finally revealing their Buddha-nature. As he wrote, ‘there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love illuminates our being.’ I’ll put in a clip of another superb performance – Rattle/CBSO – at the end of this post, so you can get a glimpse of what it’s all about.

I had tears in my eyes at the end – something I don’t recall from previous performances. Half of the audience got to their feet during the applause, and I don’t know why the other half didn’t do the same. I never expect to hear a better performance of the symphony, and I’m grateful to have been present for that one. I don’t want to intensify the competition for tickets, which are going fast or already gone, but if you haven’t yet booked, I would suggest that you think about trying to hear some of the eight symphonies that remain. I couldn’t get to The Song of the Earth on Saturday, sadly, but I’m hoping to hear number 3 on 13 February. I probably won’t bother you with my amateurish comments on it. But if Thursday is any indication, this Mahler season is going to be unforgettable.