VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Guest-led by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich and with LSO first cello Tim Hugh leading that section, there were a good few unfamiliar faces onstage for the RSNO’s Mahler 9. Special mention should also go to the young woman guesting at principal horn, because Amadea Dalzeley-Gaist was, alongside first viola Tom Dunn, one of the star soloists of the night.

Those virtuoso solo turns, however, are not the main story of the last big work the composer completed. The Ninth attracts a good crowd for the sense of occasion that comes with making grand use of  the full forces of a symphony orchestra for at least an hour and a quarter, if taken at speed, and for the plangency of its finale, unresolved though it remains in every performance.

RSNO music director Thomas Sondergard’s Mahler 9 was neither especially brisk nor over-indulgent. That finale was very beautiful, and meticulously-paced, but not heart-breaking, and arguably that is quite correct. The sadness the composer had recently endured at the time of its composition, as well as his own failing health, are often heard in the music, but the ending remains enigmatic, if emphatically not expressing any triumphant victory over the grave.

There is a lot of music to hear before then in any case, and so many important details of the writing seemed freshly minted in this performance. It is a curiosity of the Ninth that the second violins often make the first statement of a theme, and in Sondergard’s interpretation it seemed particularly clear that the device enabled the firsts to make a striking impact when they joined in.

Equally important among the strings were the eight double basses; Nikita Naumov’s section were a terrific ensemble from early in the first movement to the work’s completion 80 minutes later.

The long relationship between the RSNO players and this conductor was always clear in Sondergard’s dynamic control of proceedings, and that was just as evident in the colourful shorter movements. The dance music of the second movement began in jolly fashion but there was a sense of ironic detachment as it moved into more complex material, and that led on to the very strange Rondo-Burleske with something more approaching logic than is often audible, even if the slower music that interrupts the third movement’s craziness is still the weirdest part of the whole work.

Those who hear in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony a depiction of a full life could certainly cite this reading as proof, birth evoked in its opening bars, unpredictability at its heart and the mystery of life’s ending in this world at its conclusion. Whatever the work’s narrative, Sondergard and the RSNO made its substantial length compelling and constantly fascinating listening.

Keith Bruce