Royal Festival Hall, London
Once again, in a seemingly endless season straddling the anniversaries of the composer's birth and death, the LPO offered a lifeline to concert-goers suffering Mahler fatigue. Its own uncommonly probing series of Mahler-based concerts ended not with a symphony but, less obviously, with songs.
Not that the two were ever far apart for a composer whose symphonies and songs cross-fertilised each other to an extraordinary degree. We heard eight songs, all from his settings of the Knaben Wunderhorn poems; the first, Mahler's characteristically straight-faced but lively description of St Anthony preaching to the fishes, took us directly into the sumptuous world of the Second Symphony, the scherzo of which uses the same music.
The orchestra was on superb form, especially in the closing Revelge, in which Jurowski seemed able to turn the volume of the martial wind and brass up and down as precisely as with a remote control. But Hanno M�ller-Brachmann, a late stand-in as soloist, matched the players for vivid expression all the way. M�ller-Brachmann is a rising star in Germany, and with good reason; his sonorous, flexible bass-baritone communicated every single word. Only in Das Irdische Leben, a song about a starving child for whom the promised bread arrives just too late, might less have been more.
The songs were framed with two symphonies, to which Jurowski brought a rather solemn approach. Haydn's No 88 sounded aristocratic and slightly staid. But Brahms's Fourth was a triumph. Opening with a melody that seemed to ride the surface of a huge ocean swell teeming with undercurrents, Jurowski aimed for, and achieved, a performance of colossal proportions. It's not the only way of performing Brahms; it's not even Jurowski's only way of performing Brahms. But in the heady Mahlerian context, it was stunning.
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