Berlin Philharmonic / Simon Rattle, Royal Festival Hall, review. interview, live music

The Berlin Philharmonic’s London series has certainly been shrewdly planned.

It started small on Sunday with a clutch of chamber works, swelled by finely calibrated degrees through Haydn, Schubert and Mahler’s most refined symphony, the fourth.

Finally last night it climaxed with his most extravagant symphony, the third. Simon Rattle often likes to introduce a vast-scale piece with a little amuse-bouche, and on this occasion he gave us two delicious ones: Brahms’s tiny “Es tönt ein voller Harfenklang” (Harp notes ring forth) and Hugo Wolf’s setting for the women’s chorus and orchestra of Shakespeare’s “You spotted snakes,” in German translation, a surprisingly innocent piece from this most ironic composer.

After all this delicate melancholy and magic-forest gossamer, the first movement of Mahler’s third symphony burst in like some beery holiday parade in Vienna (to borrow Richard Strauss’s description).

The 140-minute six-movement behemoth is a riotous grab-bag of every mood in Mahler: parade-ground raucousness, rustic dances, rapt mysticism, consoling hymnody.It’s a long way from the refinement and ironies of the 4th, and Rattle didn’t always seem comfortable with its sheer unruliness. He seemed to want to smooth some of the rough edges of the first movement in particular. Where the music became inward, or danced en pointe, the performance really took off.

The second movement was so delicately done I forgot how sugary it is, and the cheerful innocence of the Angel’s song sung by the Ladies of the BBC Singers and London Symphony Chorus came over beautifully (and let’s not forget the Eltham College Choir, incisive and bang in tune).

Two things capped the performance and raised it to something really marvellous. The first was contralto Nathalie Stutzmann’s vibratingly intense rendition of Zarathustra’s Midnight Song. Not many singers can plumb this unfathomably deep text, but she is one of them.

The second was the way Rattle made the consoling hymn of the final movement soar over its entire 25-minute span.

This being Mahler the ecstatic unfolding has to be riven by crises, and only on the third attempt does the hoped-for resolution come.

Its overwhelming power was due partly to Rattle’s unerring sense of pacing; but it was also a tribute to the power of this orchestra, which always seems to have more in reserve. After so many demonstrations of individual brilliance, there was a nice symbolism in ending with the might of the collective voice.