Mahler Symphony No. 9 Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä BIS BIS-2476 (CD/SACD) 81:32 mins
Towards the end of their lives, some of the great composers seemed to develop a sixth sense that allowed them to gaze onto otherworldly vistas of imagination – a kind of ‘beyond’, exploring new and remote musical territory that only they could perceive. Beethoven’s late sonatas and string quartets come to mind. So do Bruckner’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, and Bach’s A Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue. In the same company are Mahler’s ‘song symphony’ Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and his Ninth Symphony – his last completed work before his death in 1911, aged just 50.
Commentators on the symphony have often read much into Mahler’s heart condition; a defective valve was diagnosed immediately after the traumatic death of his infant daughter Maria from scarlet fever and diphtheria in 1907. Even so, much of the Ninth proclaims a renewed and burgeoning love of life, alongside a magnificent pride in creative powers that were at their peak. In his perceptive booklet note for this release, Jeremy Barham emphasises that the poignancy also pervading much of the music surely relates to Mahler’s unfinished grieving of Maria’s death, besides heightened awareness of his own mortality.
Doing justice to a work composed on such a vast emotional scale is a major challenge for any conductor-and-orchestra team. Osmo Vänskä made this recording a few months before the end of his 19-year tenure as the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director, and the result is truly exceptional. In the two huge outer movements, Vänskä’s approach is different from the kind of hyper-intense psychodrama associated with Leonard Bernstein (and which surely only Bernstein’s unique genius could bring off convincingly). The emphasis here is on beautifully judged line and flow, allowing the music’s expressive extremes to speak for themselves without any need for exaggeration. Mahler’s concept of a Scherzo movement as an ironic dance of death was one of his trademarks. Vänskä duly maximises the coarseness of the second movement’s harsh parody of an Austrian Ländler country waltz; and the Rondo-Burleske’s obsession with chasing its own tail hurtles along at full tilt.
The Minnesota Orchestra’s response to this interpretation has a particular kind of pliable mastery, precisely shaded rather than garishly coloured, that suits the music to near-perfection. So does the recorded sound, demonstrating how the spacious acoustic of Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall also wonderfully conveys orchestral detail. Among countless memorable moments from a stellar team of principal players, many come from the principal horn, whose way of making things quietly happen in one solo phrase after another mesmerises the ear. When the first movement’s closing horn-call for the section’s first and second players arrives, the moment is as beautiful as you’ve by now come to expect, and so is the E flat clarinet’s demanding solo that follows – slow, quiet, ultra-exposed and delivered with flawless poise. Throughout the closing Adagio the string section’s singing tone, tireless yet never portentous, leads towards the quietest of quiet endings, performed with extraordinary concentration and control.
This is one of those listening experiences where the world afterwards is a different place.
Malcolm Hayes