This is Mark Elder’s final season as the Hallé’s music director, after 24 years with the Manchester orchestra. To open the season he chose Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a work often thought of as valedictory but, as Elder pointed out in an insightful pre-concert talk, it’s a misconception that the composer wrote it with a death sentence hanging over him after the diagnosis of his defective heart. “I have never believed that!” said Elder, explaining that no one had told Mahler he was dying when he sat down to write the work in 1909. Over the ensuing hour-and-a-half, Elder presented an often original, but never less than enthralling vision for this most complex of works.
After almost a quarter century, conductor and orchestra have become a finely honed machine that thinks and feels as one. There is an oaken warmth to the blended sound, especially the strings, yet there’s plenty of individual character, too, as evident in the evening’s distinguished solo contributions. What Elder brings to the party is a keen feel for rubato and an instinct for a dramatic through-line born of the opera house. The long first movement, for example, which can leave an audience lost in the thickets, was most carefully mapped out. Speeds were on the slow side, but nothing dragged. The mellow opening felt noble, the darkening clouds, weighty and portentous. Elder laid bare thorny, Berg-like harmonies with frightening intensity. Ear-shattering conflicts resolved in titanic climaxes.
Adopting an ever-so-slightly ponderous pace for the second movement was a masterstroke. Not only did it facilitate some splendidly vulgar playing – braying woodwind, crunching strings, brass rumbling like a herd of flatulent pachyderms – it provided an illuminating contrast with the subsequent Rondo-Burleske. Driven hard, this brutal exercise in emotionless counterpoint seethed and spun like some kind of hellish merry-go-round.
In the finale, the conductor’s decision to divide violins left and right paid dividends in terms of texture and clarity, and there was a terrific body to the Hallé strings. Shaping each bar for maximum impact, Elder dug deeply into Mahler’s boundless reservoir of love and compassion, before steering the ship over the horizon towards a land of peacefulness and hope.
