The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is celebrating its 30th birthday by giving the period-instrument treatment to a pair of late-Romantic 19th-century symphonies, under two of its principal artists. Next week, Simon Rattle will conduct Bruckner’s Sixth, but first, Vladimir Jurowski took on Mahler’s Second, the Resurrection Symphony, with an orchestra of well over 100 players, the Philharmonia Chorus, and soloists Adriana Kučerová and Sarah Connolly.
In its typically rather detached way, Jurowski’s account was both a fascinating exercise in historical reconstruction and a satisfying musical experience in its own right. But it’s one that would have been even more revealing had the OAE been more forthcoming in detailing the instruments that its players used, as François-Xavier Roth’s period band Les Siècles is when it explores French orchestral works from Mahler’s period. Such detail might not fit well into the orchestra’s fluffy and generally inadequate programme books, but if this really was an attempt to present the symphony “as Mahler might have heard it when it was first performed”, then it would have been worth knowing when the woodwind instruments were made and whether they were French or German, whether the trumpets had rotary valves or pistons, and so on.
Even without that provenance, there was much to enjoy and ponder on – details of Mahler’s scoring that are obscured or overwhelmed in conventional modern performances, which Jurowski’s generally sedate tempi helped to clarify, too. There was the shiver of cymbals in the closing bars of the first movement, for instance, the harps reinforcing the pizzicato strings in the reprise of the Ländler second, and, more theatrically, the offstage trumpet calls of the finale, sounding from different points all around the auditorium. Not the most visceral or earth-shattering account of this monumental work, but a consistently interesting one.
