REVIEW: Viennese Classics, Philharmonic Hall

May 25 2009 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

SCHOENBERG. The very name used to send people rushing away, fearful that atonality or serialism would offend delicate musical souls.

Now, this composer often fills concert halls. It’s easy to see why. Forgetting the fascination of his groundbreaking later works, his early works used the rich, almost sickly-sweet language of the late Romantic. That was certainly the case at this weekend’s Royal Liverpool Philharmonic concert where Vasily Petrenko conducted a spirited though perhaps slightly ragged performance of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No 1. This was Schoenberg’s reworking of his 1906 work, scored for large orchestra but without percussion. In this work, the composer is almost laying out his manifesto for the future of music as he saw it: chords constructed on fourths, rather than the thirds to which we had been used for centuries, whole tone scales which challenged the very ideas of harmonic and melodic language.

It’s also something of a concerto for orchestra, with complex, challenging lines for many soloists and the RLPO rose to the occasion, though with reservations.

The other work in the programme was Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which could have been conceived in a wholly different world from the Schoenberg though their composition was only separated by seven years. This is a bright, often cheerful composition devoid of the introspection, even depression, for which Mahler is renowned. It’s a work, like the Schoenberg, which places huge demands on soloists. Of particular note were the brass, the horns and the woodwind principals along with the leader of orchestra as well as, perhaps rather unusually, the harp.

It’s also a work which changes tempo on practically every page of the score. The slow movement was especially intense as was the pianissimo conclusion where you really could hear a pin drop in the hall.

As in many works of this period, Mahler calls for a soprano soloist in the finale, a reworking from his song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Elizabeth Watts avoided the dramatically operatic approach to this rather heartfelt finale but, at times, she felt a little overwhelmed.

That said, though, it was an intense and satisfying performance.

GLYN MON HUGHES