Prom 33: Mahler, Schubert & Glanert - 11.08.19

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

20:00 Sunday 11 August 2019
Royal Albert Hall

Detlev Glanert: Weites Land (’Musik mit Brahms’ for orchestra) - UK première
Franz Schubert: Einsamkeit for soprano and orchestra (orch. D. Glanert)
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No 4 in G major

Christina Gansch soprano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Semyon Bychkov conductor

Semyon Bychkov traces the evolution and genealogy of Austro-German music in a fascinating Prom featuring three works from three different centuries.
Schubert’s influence on Mahler is clear from the weary loveliness and fretful anxiety of Einsamkeit (‘Loneliness’), heard here in an elegant orchestration by contemporary composer Detlev Glanert.
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, bright with sleigh bells and innocent wonder, glances back to Classical models from the vantage point of fin-de-siècle Vienna, while Glanert takes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony into the 21st century in his lyrical Weites Land (‘Open Land’).

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I often think Mahler 4 is his finest, but that's just a personal reaction.

[Tevot]

I often think Mahler 4 is his finest, but that's just a personal reaction.

Hello there,

This to me looks a very promising concert. I admire Glanert's orchestration / rendering of Brahms' 4 Serious Songs so I am looking forward to seeing / hearing what he fashions with the Schubert.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[gurnemanz]

Hello there,

This to me looks a very promising concert. I admire Glanert's orchestration / rendering of Brahms' 4 Serious Songs so I am looking forward to seeing / hearing what he fashions with the Schubert.

Best Wishes,

Tevot

I was going to have a lazy Sunday but am tempted to make the effort and turn up. I definitely want to hear Christina Gansch.

[bluestateprommer]

Solid start to this Prom with Glanert's Brahms homage, where fortunately he doesn't quote the Brahms 4 theme too overtly. For gurnemanz, hope that you post later after seeing this concert at the RAH live :) . CG is charming in her pre-concert banter with Petroc now.

PS: Fine orchestration of 'Einsamkeit' by DG, with CG sounding very good indeed. I thought that I detected one or two modest text deviations, from following the text c/o Vol. 29 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition:

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/notes/33029-B.pdf

[gurnemanz]

Half-time report: Loved CG. Beautiful clear tone and text compellingly put across. Right up my street. And Mahler to come.

[Alison]

Half-time report: Loved CG. Beautiful clear tone and text compellingly put across. Right up my street. And Mahler to come.

Beautifully played Mahler, this must be the best BBC Orchestra now.

I suspect Petrushka is enjoying the pacing

[jayne lee wilson]

What an absolutely lovely Mahler 4.... may be hard to return to the Earthly life after that....

:daff2:

[bluestateprommer]

I guess that I'm the dissenting voice with SB's Mahler 4, since I found it more than a shade hard-driven and over-edgy in the 1st 2 movements, including a very few modest clams (and one ill-timed cough early on and one cell phone from the audience - good tribute to BBC sound engineering, that) that resulted from SB's hard edges in his interpretation, IMHO. Maybe he wanted to remove any hint of sentimentality or sugar in the work, or something of that sort. Even though Petroc said that SB had particular ideas about how he wanted the finale to be interpreted (the "absolutely without parody" idea, pace Mahler), which has implications for CG's freedom as an artist in her own right, CG did allow herself just a touch of "kid in a candy store" in her musical acting out of the text in places. To give SB some credit, he did relax his mood in the slow movement, and the hard-driving bits in the finale were consistent with the hard-driving bits in the 1st movement. Perhaps not a Mahler 4 for the ages at least for me, but that's just my personal reaction.

Plus, if people are happy with how the BBC SO sounds from this work, that is a tribute to their current chief conductor, who has been building on the work of the prior (and sadly gone from this world too soon) chief conductor....

[edashtav]

Half-time report: Loved CG. Beautiful clear tone and text compellingly put across. Right up my street. And Mahler to come.

Your spot kick was right on target, gurnemanz, I, too, loved the first half but must catch the Mahler later as dinner takes priority.

[Petrushka]

Beautifully played Mahler, this must be the best BBC Orchestra now.

I suspect Petrushka is enjoying the pacing

Yes indeed, an excellent Mahler 4 and the BBC SO better than I've ever heard them. Superb woodwind characterisation throughout, providing the unsettling bumps, bangs and general grotesquerie of a child's nightmare. Strings in fine form. Christine Gansch as ideal as we've any right to expect in the finale.

In short, the best Mahler 4 I've heard in a long time.

[Maclintick]

To give SB some credit, he did relax his mood in the slow movement

Not enough, IMHO -- there wasn't the feeling of time standing still...maybe intentional on SB's part. This is one of GM's greatest movts, along with the finale of no 3...it needs more time to breathe than it received this evening..

[Constantbee]

I do not consider myself to be a German language expert by any means but come on, it’s ‘weites Land’, ‘weit’ (meaning broad or wide) rhymes with ‘white’ not with ‘tweet’, right? Haven’t the presenters got anybody to ask to check basic pronunciation like this before they go on air? ‘How much are we paying these people?’ etc etc It just serves to confirm my dismay that there is so little interest in German language in the UK these days: more students are now enrolling for GCSE Chinese than German, I believe Bad news for singers with English mother tongue, then

I enjoyed the Schubert and thought Gansch was an excellent choice for this. She has quite a mature voice for someone so young.

[gurnemanz]

A rewarding evening and I'm glad we decided to set off down the M4 to catch it.
It was a one-off programme with Hamburg/Vienna links:
Hamburg: Glanert/Brahms. Vienna: Schubert/Mayrhofer/Mahler. Brahms of course divided his life between the two cities. Glanert came on beaming to take a bow for each of his works.
She might have been underpowered for some but I was won over by Christina Gansch who made beautiful silver-toned contributions in both halves. I got a lot more out of the lengthy song Einsamkeit as orchestrated by Glanert than I ever have from CD versions with piano, of which I have four, including F-D/Moore and a very good wartime recording from Peter Anders and Michael Raucheisen. My favourite version is on a fine disc from Rainer Trost on Naxos.
For me Bychkov did not really put a foot wrong in the Mahler. There was a good balanced sound and some fine solo playing.

[jayne lee wilson]

PROM 33/II MAHLER 4 GANSCH/BBCSO/BYCHKOV.
(Outstanding AAC webcast, with strikingly clear, finely-focussed detail. PPs were truly quiet but never too remote or distant).

The BBCSO would seem to be a wonderful Mahler Orchestra these days, recalling their recent Song of the Earth with Ed Gardner (so sharp, so keenly-observed, so true); this time, I relished their response to Bychkov’s direction of the sublime 4th Symphony.

Perfectly paced by Bychkov, the strings sweet and precise, winds prominent and colourful, the tempi following each mood, each episode of the enchanted tales; the changes of pace so natural and effortless (“never a boast or a see-here” as Basil Bunting described Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas in Briggflatts) Bychkov was a master storyteller in this first movement; shaping it with a warm smile or an impish glance; he didn’t need a glittering eye. So we drew attentively close.
I liked the subtle dynamic contrast between the tension, the sudden brief threat, of the development climax; then the slightly less powerful, but uninhibitedly joyful one in the recap. Such carefully-prepared distinctions can so easily go unappreciated.

The scherzo, by turns spiky and dreamily distracted, offered some wonderful string and wind solos, and the soft translucent textures of the lazy-ländler trio were a marvel of tonal beauty and control.
Those delicate violins in the poco adagio were approaching heaven prematurely, the portamento sweet and discreet … but Bychkov drew far, far back into spareness, stillness, a wistful solitude, when just a horn, then a wind soloist, then two, were left alone with their regretful reflections. Perhaps the fast variation didn’t lose its dizzy, tipsy head quite enough: one drink too few perhaps….but the true climax didn’t disappoint; yet Bychkov ensured it was a proportionate 4th-Symphony-Climax, not some generic huge Mahlerian one.

Lovely fresh, youthful un-operatic soprano (for this relief much thanks) for the Heavenly Life (Christine Gansch)…… vividly evocative tone-painting of heavenly creatures here, in which I especially enjoyed those droll, mooing ruminants.

***
Yes, it’s great to get excited about new, young, relatively little-known conductors; how wonderful to see the Proms promoting them. But I felt that tonight, Bychkov showed the touch of a mature master, in the wide-ranging expressiveness, effortlessly natural rubato, tonal beauty and sheer subtlety of the BBCSO’s response.

Delighting the senses and awakening us to joy:
Mahler idiomatically comme il faut…