By Walter Ego
Standing ovation, a countless number of minutes of applauses, the hall fully crowded from the arena to the gallery… ok, this is obviously not the beginning, but sometimes good things can be judged by their happy ends…
Mahler is not the most famous composer: I mean, he is not as famous as Beethoven, or Mozart, or Bach, but maybe his strength is that he is more contemporary compared to the other immense masters of classical music without being too far from what ‘normal’ people expects from classical music. He was, indeed, an innovator, but his innovations are ariose, involving, celestial and, above all, after more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted music, after a last movement leading to an endless finale, after an almost infinite number of musical variations and jokes, you may think: “Are we going to get an encore?”.
Well, time to ‘get down’ to features: we are talking about the Prom 51, Wednesday 22nd August 2007 at the Royal Albert Hall. It is Mahler on stage with his Symphony No. 3 in D minor played by the Lucern Festival Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado. In Mahler’s words this symphony “goes beyond all bounds”, and in fact it is a variegated collection of trivialities melted down with the highest peaks of ‘serious music’ within the six movements that represent a journey moving from nature and reaching what Dante Aligheri in his The Divine Comedy called “Love, which moves the Sun and the other stars”, the power of transcendental love which originates from God.
The Nietzschean presence from Also sprach Zarathustra is not aggressive, as it just adds a touch of humanity to the symphony: not for nothing the fourth movement was subtitled by Mahler ‘What night tells me (mankind)’. And another touch of humanity comes from Claudio Abbado, one of the most acclaimed Italian conductors, who has masterfully conducted ‘his’ orchestra – the Lucern Festival Orchestra was founded on his initiative in 2003 – by adding a passionate and sweet – but not sugary – Italian flavour to the Teutonic notes: something that the whole audience fully enjoyed.
Copyright 2007 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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