MIGHTY MAHLER TRIUMPHS (EVENTUALLY)

CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
"Déjà vu (noun): the feeling or illusion that one has experienced something before although one is actually experiencing it for the first time." That's the dictionary definition and it was, uncannily, exactly what I felt at my first CBSO concert of 2026.  A concert starting with Mahler's 'Blumine', the movement the composer cut from the final version of his first symphony, and ending with a performance of the revised Symphony No.1. In between there was the UK premiere of a challenging work by a living composer. Yet I remembered another cold winter night a couple of weeks into January when I attended just such a concert sitting in the same stalls seat. No illusion though. It happened on January 12, 2023. Then the conductor was Gergely Madaras and the new work was Austrian composer Thomas Larcher's Symphony no.3 ‘A Line above the Sky’. Now it was Kazuki Yamada and the new work was Japanese born, British-based, composer Dai Fujikura's Trombone Concerto (Vast Ocean II). Repeating a winning formula, or a bit of lazy ready-made programming? Either way it worked.
Fujikura is fascinated by 'Solaris', Stanislaw Lem's science fiction novel made famous by film director Andre Tarkovsky's 1972 metaphysical masterpiece, in which a scientist on a space station observes a distant planet Solaris and its vast ocean. Not just any body of water though, but a gigantic mind which can alter space, time and human thoughts and emotions. Fujikura composed the first version of 'Vast Ocean' in 2005 and then his first opera, 'Solaris' in 2014 so clearly his engagement with the work is no passing fancy. Fujikura sees the strange entity as, "an ocean unlike anything on Earth. The trombone is the person who has arrived there" and so the concerto "is the world as seen through that person’s eyes." Many music lovers will remember the soloist Peter Moore as the diminutive Belfast boy who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2008 at the age of 12, dexterously playing an instrument almost as big as himself. Now a towering virtuoso he met all Fujikura's demands with ease; questioning, cajoling and interrogating the alien conundrum represented by the full orchestra with every musical means at his disposal. His thwarted mission led to the soloist expressing his exasperation with some sly humorous glissandi. What was lacking from Fujikura was the musical equivalent of the ocean's mystical menace, the alien force sounding pretty tame, the repeated tinkling tiny gong chimes sounding particularly trite. Ultimately the ocean is unknowable and the solo trombone gets no response,  just like the solo trumpet's similar quest in Charles Ives' 'The Unanswered Question'.

Mahler was right to dispense with ‘Blumine’ as the second movement of his first symphony, making the work more concise and structurally tighter. It remains a charming pastoral piece and as a ten minute tone poem worked well with Yamada coaxing some lovely light textures from the strings and Mahler's star part for the trumpet played with sensitivity and a wide range of tone colour by Holly Clark. The symphony itself began in disappointing fashion. Mahler told the conductor Franz Schalk that the symphony's introduction was about the "sounds of nature, not music!" but what Yamada delivered was simply an orchestra playing music very quietly and quite devoid of the uncanny, mysterious and slightly sinister element Mahler demanded. When at the movement's end the sun arrived in blazing glory and the orchestra responded in a tremendous climax, we had arrived in Yamada territory - extroverted and demonstrative. After that all was plain sailing. The second movement scherzo was as Kräftig (Strong) as Mahler wanted, the CBSO's strings really digging deep, brass, wind and timpani hammering out the rustic rhythms of a peasant dance, the contrasting central section a sylvan idyll. The third movement's blackly comic 'Frère Jacques' dirge rightly began with Anthony Alcock's solo bass rather than the dubious 1992 score's "corrected" interpretation for full bass section (as used when Mirga conducted it in 2016) and Yamada, always at his best with dance rhythms and colour, ensured a delightful cacophonic collision when the funeral march meets the tipsily jaunty village klezmer band. The final movement's stormy opening rattled the rafters and Yamada, exercising restraint and control, ensured that the first deceptive musical eruption did not pre-empt the movement's actual climax. When that came the whole orchestra was transformed into a single musical ecstatic roar, quickly followed by a similar response from a (hearteningly large and enthusiastic) audience.

Norman Stinchcombe