Happy Haydn, slow motion Mahler

The previous MPO music director, Kees Bakels directed a near completed Mahler cycle in his tenure here. Having performed Mahler's 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th (under various conductors), 6th, 7th and the 9th (under Benjamin Zander), the MPO entrusted the 10th (in the Deryck Cooke completion) to the up-and-coming Hannu Lintu, who made an impressive debut at the DFP Hall a few years ago.

The Haydn "Drum Roll" Symphony (No 103) prefaced the Mahler. Using period timpani, Lintu led a performance that was clear in textures, with warm phrasing and quite tight ensemble-wise. The highlight was the violin leader's solos - played neatly in tune by Markus Gundermann, without that soloist and bowing flair that the best concertmasters have inherent in them. This was the better of the 2 performances of the night.

The Mahler however, was over-long - a performance that stretched to about 85 minutes in total. Actually, Mahler completed only the first movement and left sketches for the rest of the movements. Conductors like Claudio Abbado and the late Gary Bertini only believed in the first movement and performed/recorded only that movement. Other maestros like Sir Simon Rattle, Mark Wigglesworth and Rudolf Barshai have played the symphony complete (using other composers' completions such as the Deryck Cooke version, etc).

The BBCNOW/Wigglesworth Cooke version (given with the BBC Music Magazine) took only 74 minutes to perform, whilst the award winning Berlin PO/Rattle EMI live Cooke version was 77 minutes long. Rudolf Barshai conducting his own completion also took 74 minutes over the whole piece, so I wondered how Lintu managed to stretch the piece to 85 minutes.

The Mahler was painful to listen to as the violins were not sure of themselves, phrasing was flat, the momentous moments lacked tension and the dynamics were compressed into a narrow range. The horns were typically out of tune in places and played with the usual and occasional split notes. However, the highlight of the performance was by Hristo Dobinov - one of the MPO's best woodwind players, in the fifth movement's unearthly and beautiful flute solo.

I believe that Lintu has to re-think his interpretation to make it a bit more taut. For now, Mahler 10 is out of his league. My parting shot is to wonder if we could have a Mahler 3 and/or 8 in the coming years, though the DFP Hall would be hard-pressed to accommodate the audience, let alone the orchestra.