The London Times
A Silent Ovation - January 19, 1996
Posted: 2002-08-26 17:48:56
THE TIMES - FRIDAY, JANUARY 19, 1996
A Silent Ovation
Benjamin Zander, like most conductors in the United States, is hot on verbal as well as musical communication. His performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony with the Philharmonic was preceded by a full hour's talk; and in place of programme notes, which Mahler abhorred anyways, there was a long and wise essay of his own.
The real communication began, though, when the baton was raised. Zander now founder-director of the Boston Philharmonic, made his mark on British audiences for the first time last year in Mahler's Sixth at the Barbican. And to welcome him back is to wonder how we ever lost him; for this fine conductor is British born and bred until Boston wooed him.
In physical precision and metaphysical vision he has filled the gap left by Klaus Tennstedt in his illness. Yet temperamentally Zander seems to share more with Sir Colin Davis. He does not live on the music's nerve but rather broadly and far-sightedly through his emotions, shaped by the music's breath and pulse. I should love to watch him rehearse to see how he obtained that veiled valediction to song in the voices of the second violins and cellos in the symphony's opening: to track his work balancing so finely the equal and individual voices in this least-instrumentally hierarchical of scores.
The second movement, that petrified Laendler from a dying Vienna was minutely imagined in its every twitch of movement and sound. Zander's pacing left it with just enough of a swing to seem a real dance, even if this was a dance of death.
The Rondo-Burleske which follows can sound more menacing than the Philharmonia allowed it to on Wednesday. But the clarity and deceptive lilt of Zander's tempo released its own strange joy, one that revealed only the horrors of happiness. The packed Barbican Hall held its breath at the start of the final adagio. Here was a near perfect transition of pace, timbre, and dynamics from the opening, agonized violin's sigh to that great abide-with-me of a chorale which dominates the movement.
As shadows of the Wunderhorn songs and Urlicht flicker from Mahler's earlier symphonies the listener is left in no doubt - from verbal reflection alone - that this is the loneliness of the soul which is speaking. As its physical life fades in the last bars, the Philharmonia played with the concentration of the finest of chamber ensembles. And even when bow and baton had given the license for applause, there was the deepest, longest silence this hall may have ever heard.
