The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, under former chief conductor Donald Runnicles, delivered a resplendent performance of Mahler's Das Klagende Lied at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, rendering the cantata's complex and contrasting moods with clarity and conviction.
Freud's diagnosis and Mahler's fairytale
When Sigmund Freud met Gustav Mahler in 1910, he suggested that, following a childhood trauma, “the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was inextricably fixed in Mahler’s mind”. Freud was famously uninterested in music, but had he known Das Klagende Lied, he would have found ample supporting evidence for his diagnosis.
Composed in Mahler's late teens and fusing opera, symphony, oratorio, lieder, part-song and even church music, the cantata collides comedy and tragedy at every turn – most remarkably towards the end, when the offstage wind band continues cheerfully as a wedding goes disastrously wrong with the revelation that the bridegroom won his bride by murdering his younger brother.
Tripartite structure and vocal storytelling
Mahler withdrew the first movement, Waldmärchen, and its manuscript remained unavailable until 1969. Performing all three movements but incorporating Mahler's later revisions, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra made a strong case for the original tripartite structure.
Emulating Wagner, Mahler wrote his own libretto, adapting a fairytale famously recounted by the Grimms, among others. Kathleen O’Mara, Catriona Morison, John Findon and Nicholas Brownlee made an eloquent quartet of storytellers, the last's rich bass-baritone projecting particularly well. The choral sections are initially fragmented, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus's first entries were tentative, but they came into their own in extended passages. The girls of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, singing from memory, were outstanding in appearances as the murdered brother's ghostly voice.
Instrumental mastery and Schubert pairing
If the cantata's vocal writing is sometimes disjointed, the instrumental music's ambition and accomplishment is astonishing for a teenage composer with little practical orchestral experience. The BBCSSO rendered Mahler's complex textures with clarity and conviction; horns, led by Chris Gough and gifted the finest music, were resplendent.
Schubert, like Mahler, often abruptly juxtaposes contrasting moods, and the first-half performance of the “Unfinished” Symphony sensitively balanced classical and romantic aspects. Dispensing with baton and with strings reduced to chamber-orchestra proportions, Runnicles achieved delicate pianissimos and highlighted both movements' dance-like character. But marked broadening of tempi at junctions and tightly stretched skeins of string sound were reminders that Wagner's Lohengrin lay barely 20 years in the future.
