In Life, in Death...the Concertgebouw abide with us at the Barbican

Saturday 5th November 2022

Rick van Veldhuizen: mais le corps taché d’ombre, (UK Premiere)
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.9

Concertgebouw Orchestra
Conductor: Daniel Harding

Through Cloud and Sunshine: Daniel Harding at the helm of the Concertgebouw
Photo Credit: Mark Allan/Barbican

Once regular visitors to the Barbican, Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra have not been seen in the City of London for six years. Coupled with their status as being undoubtedly the most high-profile international band to appear in the capital until the next Proms season at least, a palpable excitement was evident in the Barbican foyer. 

Daniel Harding was here to take the reins for a performance of Mahler's 9th Symphony. A farewell to life, a celebration of its beauty. However, opening the show was a new Concertgebouw-commissioned work, specially composed to accompany the orchestra's performances of Mahler 9 while on tour.  Veldhuizen's short piece, titled mais le corps taché d’ombre ('but the body stained with shadows'), with its electronic tones and disconcerting white noise, felt jagged and uneven, deliberately so, but if one was truly looking for the all-encompassing weight, tears, and bitterness of Mahler, there was nothing like Mahler itself. 

Harding showed all the same characteristics as in his jump-in Bruckner Prom with the Berlin Philharmonic earlier this year, those of sensitivity, balance, and utmost clarity, allowing the orchestra's sound to take precedence. Harding is very familiar with the Barbican, having been Principal Guest Conductor of the hall's resident London Symphony Orchestra for a decade until 2017, and his knowledge of the acoustics served the performance well, embracing us on the journey of Mahler's final completed symphony.

Grotesque beauty loomed large in the central movements. Harding pushed for more, revelling in dissonance as he presented a rustic playfulness in an almost satirical Länder movement which was judged with wit and rough humour, raising a smile with many in the audience to provide a brief moment of almost-levity. Not wishing to leave us with such an impression, Mahler fights a warring third movement Rondo Burleske, with soaring brass, stunningly precise and cutting, willing us, pushing us onward, against the grain of the final. Yet it was the Concertgebouw strings that left us all breathless in their contrasting full, rich sound. These anxious joys and glories were always a frantic fervour against oncoming death and decay.

Every movement of Mahler 9 is a journey in itself, yet the overall map is one of a building in intensity, where each movement grows more dramatic than the last, giving and taking hope, until a last resignation holds the closing of our eyes. Harding held us back until the fourth, perhaps at the expense of the work's overall effectiveness as a life's journey, yet when the panic, the determination, grit and difficulty of the symphony gave way to the ebbing away of life's little day, a pregnant pause, a collective holding of breath, indicated that this was indeed a performance to remember.

In that silence that hung in the hall following the last valedictory notes of the symphony, there are few appropriate words in the triumphal still. On extraordinary nights like these, the only ones that do any justice at all are those scribbled by Gustav Mahler himself on the closing pages of his manuscript to his Ninth Symphony:

O Beauty! 

Love!

World

Fare well