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Back from Elysium. St. Paul’s cathedral is a dicey venue for classical music, but even when the gold-banded dome is swallowing up the sound of the chorus like the yawning gulf in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, the church itself overawes. Music turns into a paean to architecture. God looks in through the clear, unstained windows (This is Protestantism.), cherubs comport with English admirals and generals on the periphery, some of whose statues are jauntily posed, and the white-and-black checkerboard floor reminds one of a plain Dutch parish church magnified in excelsis.
Massed choirs faced a massive audience for last night’s performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under the acclaimed Valery Gergiev. This was London’s hottest ticket for the summer, a grand culmination to “Gergiev’s Mahler,” as the London Symphony advertised it. As the LSO’s prized new Principal Conductor, Gergiev wasn’t known for Mahler, however, so launching his tenure with a complete symphony cycle in one year pricked up ears. To cap their coup, the orchestra has been releasing CDs of these performances hot off the press, mere months after the event. The long echo in St. Paul’s, which dies in Pimlico or Battersea, would seem to render a decent recording impossible, but microphone stands bristled everywhere, like pikes at the Battle of Hastings, so a good product is assured.
I booked too late and wound up seated in the south transept, my sight-line blocked by the foot of a marble saint. From my distant perspective almost no detail came through, what with the impossible echo and the thick haze of my own sins. The violas could have been improvising on “God Save the Queen.” Golden darts of sound reached me every once in a while – piccolo, celesta, a rapturous solo for the concertmaster. The brass thundered magnificently enough to serve as pillars holding up the roof. Yet through the aural murk I know I heard a great performance.
First of all, the “Symphony of a Thousand” is so hyperbolic that conductors wave their arms in broad semaphoric sweeps the way a fighter jet is landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Gergiev used delicate motions instead, as if he were guiding a single ballerina, and only occasionally did his pale hands flutter overhead. Also, after the hush of plucked strings and faraway woodwind solos that usher in Part II, the huge chorus mutters quietly in German, an effect that is often stiff and staccato (I hear tiptoeing soldiers). Under Gergiev the chorus actually sang, with suppleness and expression.
Soft passages brought real music to my quadrant of the vast space. And by some magic, the echo cancelled itself out, and all of us heard something sublime. It began with the tenor’s cry of “Blicket auf!” that begins a gradual ten-minute build-up to the final climax, which is bigger than the world. Acoustically, it must have been a combination of soft tremolo in the violins and a hushed chorus that made the sound so crystal clear, although emotionally it felt like the descent of the spirit of music. Happily, the tenor and sweetly soaring soprano, unknown to me, as were all the vocalists, sounded wonderful. Gergiev bestowed benign smiles everywhere as the score played itself. I doubt I will ever hear anything quite as sublime in such a setting again.
(No need to be jealous – you can hear Gergiev’s Mahler First and Sixth on previously release CDs, to be found on the LSO Live label produced by the orchestra. I heard them before departing the U.S. and found dozens of things to admire. I see online that the Seventh is newly available.)
After the music died, a reluctant audience trooped out into the night, greeted by a respite in the day’s unending downpour. Two ideas came to my mind. Christopher Wren’s masterpiece was built when tools consisted of simple variations on the screw, pulley, and inclined plane. Gustav Mahler wrote the Eighth in a lakeside hut while Death was thumbing his page in the book of doom.
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