It took almost a minute for the cheers to break out. The music is dead, a final, touchingly beautiful short cello solo, followed by the cello group incredibly quiet, the swaying motif in the violas, stretched, frayed, falling apart, the high buzzing of the violins, almost inaudible: Mahler’s music of the Disappearing at the end of the 9th symphony, one feels so deeply.
The 112-strong Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, conducted by Jakub Hrůša, keeps dimming the pianissimo, you almost think you can hear the heartbeats of the audience in the sold-out concert hall.
It’s hard to believe that the young musicians, who come from all over Europe, can already tell so precisely and deeply about the end. And then, silence in the hall, for many precious, fragile seconds.
Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša. © Marian Lenhard
In 2016, when the orchestra had already performed Mahler’s Ninth at the Young Euro Classic youth orchestra festival in Berlin, conducted by Philippe Jordan, the audience applauded immediately.
The fact that the silence succeeds this time is due to the hypnotic tension that the 42-year-old chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and future director of London’s Covent Garden demands of the orchestra from the first bar, the sensitively dosed dynamics and the incessant rhythmic tension. Be it the original sighing motif of the first movement, in which the music allows itself to dream one last time of a lightness that never existed, be it the grotesque distorted images of the Ländler scherzo and the rondo burlesque and those between longing and sadness wispy solitude of wind instruments and solo strings in the final Adagio.
An Estonian orchestra at Young Euro Classic Bees are buzzing on the Baltic Sea
Hrůša avoids any hard cut between the supposedly cheerful opening motives that don’t move from the spot, the melancholy gestures of farewell and the agglomerations of sound condensed into shrill chaos. Rather, he conducts smoothly organic metamorphoses. Even if one would have liked the solo horn to be a bit more differentiated: with the delicate tactile movements of the string tutti, furious accelerandi and fragrant signs of dissolution, the evening turned into a great moment of the YEC Festival 2023.
2023-08-24 15:17:43
#Gustav #Mahler #Youth #Orchestra #Music #Disappearance
