Daniele Gatti's Prom with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester will linger in the memory as being exceptionally beautiful, a quality that on occasion proved a limitation as well as a strength. Gatti's fondness for the lavish sonorities of late- and post-Romantic music was all over the programming. It's a repertoire to which the plush, classy sound of the GMJO if, for the most part, admirably suited.
That said, things were initially less than ideal. Gatti opened with the Third Act Prelude and Good Friday Music from Wagner's Parsifal, diluting the music's narcotic impact with an overly low-key approach.
There was little sense of Wagnerian extremism or religious morbidity. The strings sounded ravishing, but there was an uncharacteristic glare in the brass that only subsided in the Berg Violin Concerto which followed.
In many respects, this was the concert's high point. Written in response to the death, from polio, of Manon Gropius, the teenage daughter of Berg's friend Alma Mahler and her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius, the concerto remembers and mourns a life lost too soon, before positing the idea of eventual transcendence beyond the grave. The depth and sincerity of Frank Peter Zimmermann's playing was second to none. Gatti, adding intensity to beauty, probed its emotional resonances with tremendous subtlety.
Two very different portraits of Vienna came after the interval. First was the Suite from Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, compiled anonymously and awkwardly in 1945. The last few bars are crass and not found in the opera. The performance, though, was about as headily sensual as you can get. The second was Ravel's La Valse, fastidiously done, but suitably convulsive at its close. The single encore, wonderfully shaped and played, was the Third Act Prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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