Conductor Giordano Bellincampi leads the orchestra in Mahler's Symphony No. 3. Photo / Thomas Hamill, Auckland Philharmonia
Conductor Giordano Bellincampi leads the orchestra in Mahler's Symphony No. 3. Photo / Thomas Hamill, Auckland Philharmonia
Tonight, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 was the vibrant and life-enhancing finale of Auckland Philharmonia’s New Zealand Herald Premier Series.
When the orchestra last gave us this massive work in 2001, its first movement was cut off from the remainder of the score by an unnecessary interval; tonight, with music directorGiordano Bellincampi in magisterial command, the architectonic splendours of Mahler’s 132 minutes were gloriously intact.
Bellincampi commands the massive score with magisterial control and precision. Photo / Thomas Hamill, Auckland Philharmonia
It was a spectacle for eye as well as ear, with the participation of a mezzo soloist, two choirs and 18 young instrumentalists from the Australian National Academy of Music, all contributing to a magnificent Mahlerian immersion.
Bellincampi’s dramatic first movement worked through its procession of marches, both grim and triumphant. Charles Ives occasionally came to mind in Mahler’s symphonic patchworking, and the musicians did full justice to the composer’s description of summer marching in, singing and resonant in a way you cannot imagine.
Amongst a plethora of intricate orchestral detail, impeccably marshalled by Bellincampi, the almost theatrical outbursts of trombonist Douglas Cross stood out.
The second movement, in which an innocent minuet is quickly subverted into shimmering scherzo, had an ease and naturalness that reflected Mahler’s claim it was the most carefree music he had ever written, swaying and waving in the air.
Brent Grapes’ offstage posthorn solo, lonesome and mellow, contrasted with the third movement’s bubbling, occasionally bucolic mood.
Australian mezzo Deborah Humble brought a luminous gravitas to Nietzsche’s words of warning, skilfully navigating the territory between recitative and song, surrounded by Mahler’s subtlest timbre blendings.
Australian mezzo Deborah Humble brings luminous gravitas to Nietzsche's text. Photo / Thomas Hamill, Auckland Philharmonia
The women of Choirs Aotearoa offered melodious benedictions in the fifth movement, accompanied by the charming chimings of the Kristin Middle School Singers.
Spiritual resolution came with the expansive and heartrending sixth and final movement, in which Bellincampi was true to Mahler’s directive of “slow, calm and deeply felt” within just 20 crisp minutes.
The momentum was inexorable; Mahler’s compulsive modulations, melodiously introduced by violas, worked through to a closing blaze of D major, in which timpanists Steven Logan and Dominic Jacquemard were the driving force.
Next Saturday the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra signs off the year with a concert of Bruckner’s Symphony No.7 and the celebrated American mezzo Joyce DiDonato singing Berlioz.
