From a treatise to a detective – Newspaper Kommersant No. 38 (7483) dated 03/06/2023

The main cycle of the season at the Zaryadye Hall – all the symphonies by Gustav Mahler – has passed halfway. At the climax, the Third and Ninth Symphonies were performed by the State Orchestra named after. Svetlanov with Alexander Lazarev at the podium and the Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra with the new chief conductor Dimitris Botinis. Listened to early and late Mahler in metropolitan and regional interpretations Yulia Bederova.

The cycle of Mahler’s symphonies for the 2022/23 season, unlike last year’s All Shostakovich Symphonies, was specially programmed by the Zaryadye team with the participation of regional orchestras. Thus, the touring theme complemented the musical one and emphasized the fact that imperceptibly, but certainly, Mahler ceased to be the exclusive offer of just a few players: Teodor Currentzis and the MusicAeterna orchestra in their Permian period, Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater, Alexander Sladkovsky and the State Orchestra of Tatarstan, who intervened in the old dispute Petersburgers and Permians for the title of the main Russian Malerians.

Sladkovsky has a recording of all the symphonies in the works, there is nothing left, and he played one of the missing ones – the Seventh – just in Mahler’s Zaryadye series. Another tour item on Mahler’s Moscow menu is the Krasnoyarsk Academic Symphony Orchestra with Vladimir Lande: they performed the Sixth. Conducting visits can also be attributed to regional participation: the current chief conductor of the Ural Opera Ballet theater, Konstantin Chudovsky, will miraculously appear at the Fedoseevsky BSO with the “Song of the Earth” in May, and the chief conductor of the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra Dmitry Liss opened the Moscow Cycle II in September Symphony with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Bolshoi Theatre. MGASO, the NPR with Spivakov and the Polyansky State Capella have already shown their Mahler. It is clearly seen that Mahler’s music, considered rare in Russia for decades, has spread to cities and orchestras. But even in the era of regular performances from Gergiev and Currentzis, which clearly demonstrated not only the dizzying complexity of the scores, but also their seemingly extra-musical magic, Mahler remained the author of prophetic philosophical concepts formulated in an extremely difficult musical language. Initiation to them inevitably introduces musicians and listeners into the inaccessible sphere of secret knowledge. Another approach was practiced by Vladimir Yurovsky in his work with the State Orchestra: their Mahler was a subtle musical game, despite the fact that very serious topics were at stake.

The new version of Mahler by the State Orchestra, this time with Alexander Lazarev, seems to have brought us back to the era of the “magical Mahler”, the composer-supplier of majestic, if not massive, sounds, insights and sensations. The grandiose Third Symphony was performed by the State Orchestra and Lazarev, whose very appearance at the podium in Moscow is always an event, performed in an appropriately grandiose manner. The six-part narrative about the structure of the universe based on Nietzsche, from which the young Mahler learned about the nature of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles, almost entirely went on in the zone of dynamic climax, requiring the orchestra and vocalists (Olesya Petrova – mezzo-soprano, the Intrada choir and the chorus of boys . Sveshnikova) of maximum stress. And although the names of only three soloists in the orchestra were announced before the start (by the way, an unprecedented and glorious practice) – Anton Orlov (postal horn), Arkady Starkov (trombone), Sergey Girshenko (violin), – all parts in this performance should be considered solo, although not all are perfectly played. Obviously, some flaws in intonation, especially in wind instruments, were caused by forced dynamics, large and magnificent phrasing. But the whole captivated with its Dionysian rather than Apollonian character. Mahler seemed somehow triumphantly untimely, despite the fact that Lazarev is an outstanding connoisseur of sound triumphs.

A completely different, in fact, opposite concept was presented by the Novosibirsk Orchestra with Botinis. The late Mahler, who, by the time of the completion of the last, Ninth Symphony (1909), was actually not yet fifty years old, as it is believed, is saying goodbye to life in this score, appeared as a composer, who, according to him, suddenly heard “the new charm of old things” . And this Mahler – not a prophet, but a master of composition in the old sense, as a combinatorial art – conceptually and performing seemed to be more modern, transparent, technological and at the same time passionate in his own way. The orchestra, as if inadvertently, boasted of a rather strict sound discipline, which greatly adorned Mahler’s verbosity. The ninth was played as generous, refined, shy and bold music on the verge of centuries, colored with the light timbre of the strings, set as a support on a neatly balanced ensemble of wind instruments, succumbed, but not too much, to the rhythmic agility of fast parts, failed, but not too much, in the quiet movement of slow episodes. An inventive stream of memories, fantasies, vulgarities and poeticities, associations not constrained by the logic of instrumental form or literary narrative, the symphony was like an old detective story with stories of love, murder, family secrets and secret societies, and attracted at the same time with a freshness and liveliness of character. To what type of interpretation of Mahler – archivally majestic or constructively transparent in a modern way – in turn, the BSO with Chudovsky or the RNO with Alexander Rudin will incline, it will become known in the finale of Mahler’s season.