Simon Rattle conducts Mahler’s Ninth: Towards the Final Frontier

“It seems the ninth is a limit. Anyone who wants to go beyond that must leave,” wrote Arnold Schönberg in 1912 on the occasion of the premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. “Those who wrote a ninth were too close to the hereafter.”

In fact, Mahler was unable to complete any other work before his death; he himself never heard his Ninth. At the same time he tried to escape the fate of his great predecessors Beethoven and Bruckner by using the hooked counting of his symphonies. But no one can escape the one line that runs between life and death.

In the middle of a Mozart series, shortly before the start in Munich

The vehemence and love with which Mahler deals with the inevitable farewell that underlies all life on this earth, turns Simon Rattle into a rare concert experience at the conductor’s podium of the Staatskapelle Berlin. In the midst of a series of performances of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the 68-year-old leads a performance of the Ninth, which once again brings all his qualities as a musician to the fore.

And so irresistible that one would like to congratulate the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on having chosen Rattle to succeed Mariss Jansons. As much as Jansons, who died in December 2019, is missing – if you listen to this Berlin concert, you can assure Munich: Rattle is at the height of his art.

Rattle and the Staatskapelle find wild tenderness

While he can’t quite resist didactically motivated procrastination with “Idomeneo” to point out what is particularly important and beautiful, he conducts Mahler’s enormous work by heart and with great inner freedom. For decades, Rattle occupied himself with Mahler’s oeuvre, kneeling and berating it.

And then everything comes together in one evening: how infinitely tender the strings lift the beginning into space, their mellow sound is no longer quite from this world. And how resolutely the Staatskapelle Berlin is pushing towards this, no matter how incomprehensible and grotesque it may seem at times.

Rattle’s feeling for the sound of the orchestra, for his temperament, his dark blaze of color is fantastic. Together, the conductor and his musicians play themselves deeper and deeper into a wild tenderness, in which highlights fall on rarely exposed, shy sounds like gifts.

There is no longer any question as to how far Mahler’s Ninth actually penetrates to the edge of tonality, this performance seems so immediately present, so vulnerable, so powerful, so close to the ultimate limit. And a Mahler that you immediately want to hear again.

Speaking of gifts: Before the Ninth, Simon Rattle shares a gift with the audience that his composer friend Harrison Birtwistle gave him at the start of his time as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, which is now coming to an end.

“Donum Simoni MMXVIII. A Gift for Simon 2018” is a kind of weird fanfare with anticlimax for woodwind, brass and percussion. Birtwistle probably also had in mind a portrait of the recipient. It rounds out beautifully after Mahler.

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