In this concert by the Munich Philharmonic in the Isarphilharmonie, the concept of a symphony is pushed to its limits twice. With Shostakovich’s Ninth and Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”, his symphony for two voices and orchestra.
For his ninth, Shostakovich has a huge cast. But their sound is not huge; the work is both a symphony and a parody. The first movement struts teasingly, as a caricature of the military and as if to take the podium-filling orchestral apparatus ad absurdum.
The melody of the slow movements is sometimes almost sparsely reduced to just a few actors. It’s a shame that conductor Tugan Sokhiev often doesn’t see his job as conducting. He seems to be facing the orchestra, as if he were shaping the music without distance – sometimes he does that. But sometimes he does nothing, stands motionless with hanging arms, wagging his head at passages that sound mischievous.
It’s pretty as a choreography. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the pizzicato crumbles in the second movement and that everything else isn’t complete either; even a top orchestra needs rhythmic leadership and cannot solve everything on its own. The Philharmonic manages to do this remarkably well, for example with the wonderfully playing woodwinds: the beginning of the presto is magnificent, the bassoon solo in the largo is outstanding.
The individual songs that the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova sings in “Lied von der Erde” are also very beautiful. Tenor Andreas Schager sings the others. (Very loud.) Gubanova’s empathy for the lyrics (“The Chinese Flute”), in whose melancholy Mahler found himself, is wonderful. Especially with the last song, “The Farewell”, which in its otherworldly extent makes the difference between a song cycle and a song-like symphony, it is an experience how its calm design and the sensitively colored orchestral writing go hand in hand.