I have never been hypnotised. I once saw an entertainer hypnotise members of his audience. He put them to sleep on stage and then made them do funny things. Seemingly, you have to want to be hypnotised for it to work. If you’re not willing and not open to it, hypnosis can’t work on you.
It occurred to me on Friday night, as the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra played Mahler’s Symphony No 2, that you need to be willing and open to the kind of powerful and unapologetically direct appeal to the emotions that Mahler’s music makes. This is particularly true in the symphony’s gigantic final movement, and particularly true when directed as it was by principal conductor Alan Buribayev. He flung wide the gates so that emotion burst forth unimpeded like ecstatic GAA fans invading the pitch at Croke Park. It’s not fair to describe this as Mahler “engineering” a response. He was speaking from the heart, deploying his genius in order to express himself through his art.
We know more or less exactly what was on his mind because of the text – Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's hymn Resurrection – which the composer incorporated into the movement and set for two soloists and large choir: nothing less than the deepest concerns about the point of existence and the question of eternal life. Whether or not you agree with Mahler's conclusion, you can relate to the immense relief and joy it brought him having reached it. If you were willing and open to it, the music on Friday might well have moved you. And if it did, it would have been due in no small measure to Buribayev's heart-on-sleeve approach and to the fervent singing of soprano Máire Flavin and mezzo Patricia Bardon.
Above all, what struck home was how the members of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir – carefully prepared by chorus master Mark Hindley – endured with tuning intact their hour-long wait through four movements, silently seated on stage, before rising and, with amassed strength and solidarity, scaling the final climactic points in text and music that Mahler reserved for them. Of course, some felt it was OTT.
Dizzying Disney
The people who thought it was overdone would probably have felt the same the following night at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, when the RTÉ Concert Orchestra provided live accompaniment to the screening of selections from Disney's two Fantasia movies (from 1940 and 2000), classical music extracts precisely co-ordinated with original cartoon animation.
Perhaps here we can talk of engineering a response, even the manipulation of emotions. And yet anyone willing would have been moved, for example, by the triumph of creation over destruction in a mythic reimagining of Stravinsky's Firebird, or by the sight of humpback whales rising majestically out of the Arctic Ocean and flying through the black night sky to Respighi's The Pines of Rome.
Not that everyone in the theatre could have known that the music was by Stravinsky or Respighi, alas, since the names of pieces and composers were not provided to the audience by either printed programmes or on-screen graphics. A lost opportunity.
Still, it was good to see conductor John Wilson skilfully hold the sounds and visuals together, and great to hear the awestruck gasps of children in the audience, as well as the futile struggles of one man to stifle what turned into his uncontrollable laughter at the pas de deux danced by a hippopotamus (in tutu) and a crocodile to Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours.
Chamber music
There was also much chamber music over the weekend. But whereas the Mahler depended significantly on its written texts, and Disney and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra supplemented their programme with animated images, there was no such extra-musical content in any of the chamber music.
This did not diminish the music’s emotional strength. Somehow these chamber pieces achieved that impact entirely on their own, raising old questions about how music actually works, about “absolute” music and about ideas such as Walter Pater’s famous assertion that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”.
If part of what Pater meant was that music can speak to us more directly than other art forms, and without reference to anything external to itself, then there were persuasive examples here. Among the most obvious of these were works by Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart.
Led by the pianist Jorge Mengotti, Spain’s Trio Rodin played Beethoven’s C minor Piano Trio (Op 1 No 3) in the Hugh Lane Gallery. Here there is nothing external, and the music – just as with other C minor works by Beethoven, which this trio plainly foreshadows – makes its substantial impact on the listener directly. Offering an ideal contrast, the Trio Rodin paired the work with one by the musicians’ countryman Enrique Granados: his Piano Trio Op 50, which happened to receive its first performance in 1895, the same year as the Mahler symphony.
From only four years earlier came the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, which was given a suave performance on Sunday by Paul Roe and the Vanbrugh Quartet in University Church, St Stephen’s Green. Again, no inspirational text, no image, nothing external – just music on its own, exercising its power to move and communicate.
And it was the same again as the Vanbrugh opened with Mozart’s G major Quartet (K387), the pure musical impact of which prompted Haydn’s famous remark to Mozart’s father: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”
- Michael Dervan is on leave
