Theme of Death Brought to Life
Death transcended could have been the subtitle to last night's Prom given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under its music director Daniele Gatti.
First came Richard Strauss's tone poem Tod und Verklarung, Death and Transfiguration. Gatti opened the work with an exquisite, cough-defying pianissimo. The transfigured ending, too, achieved a serene sense of ecstasy, but he took the main Allegro at such a lumbering tempo that the "hero" seemed to be less picking a fight with death than letting him run all over him.
Although ironed out later in the concert, there was a comparable unevenness in the conductor's balancing of the orchestra, rarely encouraging the brass to back off to let the soaring strings through.
Death was never far from Mahler's mind, and his collection of Ruckert-Lieder, although predominantly celebrating love and nature, ends with one of his most profound but defiant looks into the abyss, Um Mitternacht.
The German baritone Detlef Roth, making his Proms debut, had rather too small a voice to carry far in this hall, but managed to convey the poignancy and depth of the words and music with unnerving vocal skill.
He also showed himself to be the master of the floating pianissimo, beautifully sustained in both the opening song, Ich atmet' einen linden Duft (I breathed a gentle fragrance), and the fourth, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world).
There were some moments of stillness, indeed, in the performance of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky that completed the programme, not least mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova's moving eulogy in The Field of the Dead, but here it was the sheer loudness that thrilled the ear.
I remember commenting on these pages in the spring that after hearing the full score written for Eisenstein's film this cantata derived from it would never suffice again.
But that was not accounting for the drama and sheer vitality that Gatti brought to the piece, with the lusty voices of the London Philharmonic Choir and Crouch End Festival Chorus and the formidable ensemble-playing of the RPO making the famous Battle on the Ice fill the Albert Hall to the rafters.
