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Scoop Review: Mahler 7 - NZSO
Mahler 7
New Zealand Symphony
Orchestra
Friday, 9 November
Reviewer: Max
Rashbrooke
Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony may be one of the least well-known of its ilk, but Edo de Waart and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra made a compelling case on Friday night for a reassessment. They showed us a work of immense variety, surprising contrast and delicate shades of light and dark.
The tone was set beautifully in the opening movement, with muted horns apparently calling us to some dark adventure. In this movement, as throughout, there was a fine sense of balance, almost ambiguity – a willingness to let different moods contrast each other without any sense of conflict.
De Waart’s masterful handling of the material was evident in the exceptional cohesion of the performance, despite its harmonic ambiguities and wildly contrasting parts. In the second movement, for instance, there was already a spectral quality that melted seamlessly into the ‘ghost of a waltz’ that was the third movement. In that movement, in turn, the elaboration of a march-like theme harked back to earlier motifs.
Throughout there were delightful moments – the harps suddenly rising up with a wave of summer -like sound in the first movement, the plaintive woodwinds in the second, the wonderful call and answer of the horns in various places, the restless strings summoning up images of dark shapes flitting through the night.
The fourth
movement, meanwhile, managed to sound intimate but still
expansive. I wasn’t convinced that the mandolin sounded
properly integrated into the movement as a whole, but
that’s more a criticism of the writing than the
performance itself. And there was nothing to fault in the
finale, in which all the earlier elements were seamlessly
integrated, and sparkles of light coalesced into a blinding
blaze.
Max Rashbrooke
Journalist
Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.
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