Mahler’s masterpiece finally gets the reception it deserves

Mahler wrote his First Symphony in 1888. The year before, Stanford had produced his Irish symphony, and a year later, the year in which Mahler's symphony received its first performance in Budapest, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers began its hugely successful first run in London.

There is a wonderfully romantic contemporary description of Mahler being “drunk with the beauty of the world and with that of the sounds within him”, and also being so distracted when walking on the street with friends that he had to be protected from walking into other people.

The majority verdict on the new symphony in Budapest was negative to hostile, the public’s applause lukewarm and smattered with booing, the critics mostly dismissive. Mahler himself recalled that “my friends avoided me in terror. Not a single one of them dared to speak to me about the work or its performance, and I wandered about like someone sick or outlawed.”

What can it have been like for the listeners of that first audience, using the familiar classics to try to make sense of a symphony that kept its opening sonority – a wispy-toned, held A – for a long time as a static background, presented passages in a style of artless folksiness that most composers would have striven hard to avoid, and had a startling, violent start to its finale that must have raised the heart rates of everyone in the hall?

I can only imagine that it must have seemed like some kind of alien dish, so full of unrecognisable and exotic flavours that it remained repellent as a whole in spite of the fact that some parts of it did actually delight the palate.

Saturday's NCH performance by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop was as lucid as you could wish for, impeccably clear without being clinical, understated rather than indulgent, but in a way that made the music sound more rather than less original, and at the same time paced with a cunning that maximised the sense of logical continuity.

To 21st-century ears, it was a pleasure from start to finish. From the perspective of 1889, I suspect, you would regard the man who wrote it as a head case.

The first half of the concert, Brazilian composer Clarice Assad's Terra Brasilis, a kind of historical travelogue woven together with the Brazilian national anthem, and the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story, sounded almost tame by comparison, in spite of both works' vivid orchestral colouring and rhythmic bite.

On Sunday afternoon the NCH presented a programme of Villa-Lobos, Falla, Albéniz and Granados by the Brazilian Guitar Quartet. If your image of guitar quartets is the work of the Dublin Guitar Quartet, amplified, in-your-face, and favouring musical minimalism, the Brazilian players are at the opposite end of the spectrum: soft-spoken, impeccably finely textured, and, in spite of that, often sounding like a miniature guitar orchestra rather than a four-man group. It is that evocation of orchestral sonority that remains in the memory more than any of the individual pieces.

Incidentally, Mahler was able to know how his symphony was being received based on the applause that each movement received. Budapest heard the work in its original five-movement version, and liked the first three movements rather more than the final two.

The feedback about last week's column on premature applause suggests that people have a serious problem with it. And I can't disagree that clapping between each of the movements of Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings interferes with the atmosphere that the music is creating. Whatever about Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler expecting applause between movements, there's no doubting that Britten didn't. And yet, if there are neophyte listeners, how are they to know?

One reader kindly directed me to Alex Ross's musings on the subject (available at therestisnoise.com), which contains a few surprises on 20th-century attitudes and practices. And someone asked me about the issue of the paid applauders in claques. I know of no better or more entertaining scene-setting than that offered by Joseph Wechsberg in his book Looking for a Bluebird. His 1944 New Yorker article 'My Life in the Claque', is now freely available at josephwechsberg.com.

Wexford Festival Opera
In this year's piano-accompanied Shortworks programme, Wexford Festival Opera went back to its roots. The festival's first ever production was of Dubliner Michael William Balfe's The Rose of Castile. He featured for a second time in 1963 through The Siege of Rochelle, and The Rose of Castile was performed out of festival in the spring of 1991 in a production with two pianos standing in for the orchestra. Attempts to interest the festival in the composer's Falstaff – an early and ambitious opera in Italian rather than English, and the best work I've heard from Balfe's pen – on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth in 2008 came to naught. But the work was presented in concert that year by Opera Ireland and a CD set was subsequently issued on the RTÉ lyric fm label.

Wexford's 2013 return to Balfe is through the 1864 operetta The Sleeping Queen, which first-time opera director Sophie Motley prefaces with a bit of contextualising banter from the cast, and into which she later inserts Balfe's most famous aria, I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls. Motley's production is like a knowing student romp, hammy and full of nudge-nudge, wink-wink. It's a reasonable approach, because the question really has to be asked if Balfe's English operas can be performed in the 21st century.

They are dramatically risible and musically thin. And they don't sound well when their ballad style is treated with the full sound of a modern, operatically trained voice. Back in 1877 George Bernard Shaw (no fan of Balfe's) wrote of the contralto Antoinette Sterling singing Balfe's Rowan Tree "with a characteristic charm which baffles description". In the absence of such special singing, a work like The Sleeping Queen really comes to nothing apart from the slapstick.

Roberto Recchia updated his Shortworks production of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore to a karaoke bar, and, unusually for him, kept the running gags in some kind of proportion. The voice to watch from the lively young cast is the soprano Jennifer Davis, whose Adina was sure, stylish, touching, and, when she opened up, thrilling too.

mdervan@irishtimes.com