Liverpool Cathedral
Temporarily forsaking Philharmonic Hall for Liverpool Cathedral, Vasily Petrenko's RLPO Mahler cycle has reached the Eighth Symphony, a piece that can be worryingly venue-sensitive. You could argue that the vast spaces of this extraordinary building strike a chord with a work that strives for cosmic completeness. But the cathedral has a seven-second echo that can play havoc with music.
This is a shame, because the performance touched on magnificence. Petrenko came closer than most to solving the disparities in tone between the two movements by presenting them as antithetical. The first was earthly, clamorous, and tinged with that brutality that Petrenko has unearthed in Mahler before, while the second was otherworldly, awestruck and ecstatic. The breakneck speeds at the start formed a drastic contrast with those bizarrely beautiful moments later on when Mahler attempts to reconcile movement and stasis in the extended exploration of sustained harmonies.
But the acoustic also affected how we heard it. The second movement more or less survived the reverberation, but the first did not, with the counterpoint of the development section most detrimentally affected. No less than seven choirs were assembled, and while the bite, pungency and rapture of their singing was more than apparent, too much detail vanished into a kind of aural fog. Apart from Mario Luperi's rather wobbly Pater Profundus, the soloists were outstanding, with first soprano Claudia Barainsky doing fabulous things with her top Cs. There was a standing ovation at the end, to which Petrenko responded by repeating the final chorus ? the first time, in my experience, that part of a Mahler symphony has ever been encored.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/04/rlpo-petrenko-mahler-review
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