The complex relationship between Gustav and Alma Mahler was the subject of Marin Alsop’s latest concert with the Philharmonia, offering us “a snapshot into this special couple”, as Alsop put it in an interview in the printed programme. Gustav’s Fifth Symphony and Blumine (a movement rejected from the First Symphony), flanked four of Alma’s songs, orchestrated by Colin and David Matthews and sung by US mezzo Sasha Cooke.
The symphony’s Adagietto is widely considered Mahler’s musical love letter to Alma, the first of several, if she is to be believed. Their relationship, however, came at the price of his insistence that she give up composition, a prohibition on which he backtracked during their marital crisis of 1910, following her affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The first of her several collections of songs was published the same year: dates of composition are unclear, but most were written before she met Mahler.
The four performed here reveal a compositional voice very different from that of her husband. The influence of her teacher (and lover) Alexander von Zemlinsky is discernible in the queasy harmonic progressions of Die Stille Stadt, while fluctuations between declamation and lyricism elsewhere suggest familiarity with Strauss’s methodology. The fairytale narrative of In Meines Vaters Garten contrasts ideas of independence and submission that inevitably map on to her own biography. Cooke sang with exquisite poise and lyrical refinement: this really is a most beautiful voice. The Matthews’s orchestrations are restrained rather than plush; Alsop conducted them with warmth, care and attention to detail.
Blumine and the Fifth Symphony, meanwhile, were superbly done. Blumine, its dominant trumpet solo superbly played, seemed both to gaze back to Schubert and forward to the metaphysical landscapes of the Third Symphony. Alsop’s account of the Fifth was a thing of furious intensity, the opening movements gaunt and powerful, the lengthy scherzo swivelling between elegance and mordant humour. Where some interpreters linger and dawdle, Alsop pressed forward through the Adagietto, suggesting incipient obsession and well as desire, telling in the context. The finale was all bracing counterpoint, clarity and drive, played with tangible energy and terrific panache.
