As opening statements go, few are as emphatic as Mahler's Eighth Symphony: it began the Proms in July (commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth) and, in a performance marking a century – almost to the day – since its Munich premiere, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra launched the new season and their year-long Mahler cycle.
Mahler hardly needs an anniversary to highlight his music, yet there is something particularly fitting when the celebration of his birth in 1860 and his passing in 1911 serve to underline the life-and-death extremes of his music and, in the Eighth, his belief in the ultimately affirming power of love and light.
Conductor Andris Nelsons's natural command of his forces – not quite the thousand associated with the symphony, but massive nevertheless – allowed him to exploit the potential of Symphony Hall's phenomenal acoustic to the full. It was not just the sensation of being wrapped around by voices that was spine-tingling, or the ethereal beauty of Carolyn Sampson's Mater Gloriosa, and then blazing brass from the hall's highest galleries that made for a remarkable aural experience, but hearing the hundreds of voices at their infinitesimal quietest and feeling the gentle vibrations of sound permeate air.
Binding the first movement's setting of the medieval hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus and the second movement's setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust into a single organic structure over the music's 80-minute span is the essential, and arguably impossible, challenge of this work. It was impeccable instinct rather than the wisdom of age that characterised Nelsons's handling of the work, and the detail of the instrumental writing emerged to powerful and unifying effect. Not all the eight vocal soloists managed to project the Latin and German convincingly, inevitably negating some of their impact, but Erin Wall and Christopher Maltman were outstanding.
