Those of us who got to know Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde through Otto Klemperer’s still unsurpassed recording will probably always think of it as a searing, almost expressionist piece of raw sonorities and even rawer emotions. It’s not the only way to approach this valedictory song symphony, though, and Mark Elder’s, the main event in his prom with the Hallé, was much less confrontational, and less involving.
Elder presented it as a romantic song cycle writ large but held at arm’s length. Despite the beauty and intelligence of mezzo Alice Coote’s peerless singing, each phrase perfectly sculpted and balanced, the final Abschied never threatened to generate the overwhelming intensity it can. Tenor Gregory Kunde favoured robustness over lyrical subtlety, and inevitably sounded challenged by the opening Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde, even though Elder opted for a subtly thinned out rescoring by Colin Matthews of that movement.
Matthews was also responsible for the centrepiece of the programme, the belated first London performance of his touching Berceuse for Dresden, composed for the reconsecration of the city’s Frauenkirche in 2005. It’s a song without words for cello (Leonard Elschenbroich here) and orchestra, with its reflective melodic lines and subdued harmonies not only constructed out of the pitches and overtones of the eight bells of that church, but also eventually mingled with the prerecorded sounds of the Dresden bells themselves.
There was early Berlioz to begin – the Overture to King Lear, in which flashes of the quirky greatness to come jostle with passages indebted to Beethoven and Weber. It makes a superb orchestral workout, in which the Hallé strings and brass acquitted themselves admirably.
•On BBC iPlayer until 15 September. The Proms continue until 10 September.
This review was amended on 17 August to correct the fact that it was the first London, not British - as we first had it - performance of Colin Matthews’ Berceuse for Dresden.
