Jakub Hrůša’s considerable reputation rests primarily on his interpretations of Mozart and of his native Czech repertory. He has now turned to Mahler for a performance of the Third Symphony with the Philharmonia that began with moments of uncertainty but grew in stature and force as it progressed.
Attempting a comprehensive depiction of the cosmos as a metaphysical chain of being that progresses from raw matter to the purity of spiritual love, this is arguably the most ambitious of the composer’s symphonies and the most difficult to realise. The immense first movement pushes at the boundaries of coherence, and Hrůša revealed that as yet, he has not quite mastered it. The opening was superbly done, the sullen brass and rumbling low woodwind eerily suggesting some primal force in the process of germination. Thereafter, as life heaves into being, things felt a bit over-controlled: speeds were at times exaggerated; the music’s grandeur was occasionally emphasised at the expense of its Dionysiac fire.
Hrůša still wasn’t quite in the clear in the second movement, taken fractionally too slowly so that an element of self-conscious languor intruded on its naivety. When he reached the scherzo, its emotional ambivalences wonderfully negotiated, the performance moved on to a higher plane. The great Nietzsche setting, with Bernarda Fink the ideally hieratic contralto soloist, generated genuine mystery and awe. The bells and choruses – the Philharmonia Voices and the Tiffin Boys’ Choir – that pull the work away from the phenomenal world, swung towards the stratospheres with admirable lucidity. And the push towards the final beatific vision was superbly judged – slow yet urgent, beautifully played, the textural layering ravishingly done. An interpretation still in the making, perhaps, but the best of it was remarkable.
