Introduction

It’s always a pleasure to come back home to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra that I grew up with and the first to show me what an orchestra should be and could be.

This concert will be made even more special for me by being joined by my lovely friends Brenden Gunnell and Karen Cargill; making music on stage is always exciting, but making music on stage with friends is something entirely different. They will join us to perform Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which holds a very special connection between us as we have performed it together before.

Das Lied is not the most outward or flashy of Mahler’s works but possibly the most mature in language. It has its loud moments, of course – starting in a fiery way with the tenor, which Brenden really embraces, leading us through a massive journey, but I think some of the immense beauty of the work is in its quieter moments. For example, the last movement features the mezzo Karen and having performed it with her before, I just know she takes it somewhere very magical… Karen draws the listener into another world and I personally find it incredibly special. The piece is left hanging at the very end – breathless and timeless. I think it is one of Mahler’s most special and treasured works.

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony works beautifully alongside this concert’s theme: the Earth. It has so many grand passages and moments to just breathe and bring in the daylight. I enjoy conducting this symphony with space, letting it just be its own warm, inviting embrace of a statement towards the earth. I love how the symphony ends, it’s almost like the clouds clear after the storm and we are left with the open, radiant beauty of pure nature. This symphony perfectly helps to settle the orchestra and audience into a beautiful place before the journey of Das Lied unfolds afterwards.

This will be my first time conducting Mahler with the CBSO and I am so excited to conduct an orchestra that is very much known for its Mahler, as well as returning to conduct an orchestra that means a lot to me with some of my closest friends!

Alpesh Chauhan
Conductor

Programme Notes

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is one of the sunniest works ever written for orchestra, with its songs and merry gatherings. Mahler’s Song of the Earth is earthy indeed, with its boisterous drinking songs. But it ends with an acceptance of man’s short life – and earth’s endless renewal. Karen Cargill and Brenden Gunnell take on the powerful vocal solos, and we welcome back the brilliant Alpesh Chauhan to lead the orchestra.

Symphony No.6 in F major Op.68, “Pastoral”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Awakening of happy feelings upon arriving in the country: Allegro ma non troppo
Scene by the brook: Andante molto moto
Peasants’ merry-making: Allegro
Thunderstorm: Allegro
Shepherds’ song, happiness and thanksgiving after the storm: Allegretto

At the beginning of the 19th century, Vienna was surrounded by villages, vineyards and spa-towns, all nestling amid the wooded hills of the Danube valley. Beethoven took particular solace in these rural retreats, where the peace and solitude offered a respite for his declining hearing - and, of course, an escape from war. Vienna was bombarded and captured by Napoleon in November 1805, and again in May 1809. Beethoven sheltered in a cellar as the explosive shells rained down, a pillow clamped to his ears against the sheer pain of the noise.

No wonder the countryside meant so much to him. His servant Michael Krenn tells of him roaming the fields from six in the morning until ten at night “sketch book in hand, waving his arms, completely carried away by inspiration”. One of Beethoven’s sketchbooks, from 1803, shows him trying to write down the sound of a stream near the village of Heiligenstadt in musical notation, and the three-bar fragment of music that resulted bears an unmistakable resemblance to the rippling figure for two cellos that flows through the Andante of the Pastoral Symphony. “The broader the stream”, he observed, “the deeper the note”.

Beethoven’s love of the countryside blossomed into this symphony between the summers of 1807 and 1808 – at exactly the same time as he was writing the volcanic Fifth Symphony (in fact, both works were premiered in the same marathon concert on 22nd December 1808). The title “Pastoral” was his own, though he added a proviso that it was “More an expression of feeling than a painting”. Still, the opening is magically fresh and simple. Violas, cellos and basses lay down a quiet drone, like a hurdy-gurdy or bagpipe, and the violins try out a modest country-dance melody. The lively rhythms and bright scoring of the themes give the character of folk music, while those long-held hurdy-gurdy notes give the whole movement a sense of glorious space and freedom.

Nothing disturbs the tranquillity of the Scene by the Brook, its graceful melodies borne gently onward by the flow of the stream (two cellos). At the very end of the movement Beethoven added tiny solos for nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet) – he wrote the birds’ names in the score. Now imagine a Scherzo played by an overenthusiastic village band: the bassoonist is so confident he’s right that he belts out his plodding bass line at a ridiculous volume. The dance is cut short by a rumble of thunder and the shattering cloudburst of the Thunderstorm. Trombones and piccolo enter for the first time in the symphony. As the storm moves off, the sun re-emerges and a lovely, arcing phrase for oboe shines like a rainbow over the final rolls of thunder.

And now a shepherd’s call is heard, first on clarinet, then on horn. It’s the start of the Shepherds’ Song: an expansive and exultant rondo, moving in such broad, leisurely paragraphs that every key-change seems like the opening-out of a new and more beautiful vista. As the symphony draws to a close the music becomes hymn-like. But Beethoven never labours his point, and, with a final horn-call, the symphony winds off into the blue distance.

Das Lied von der Erde

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
(The drinking-song of the Earth’s sorrow)
Der Einsame im Herbst
(The lonely one in autumn)
Von der Jugend (Of youth)
Von der Schönheit (Of beauty)
Der Trunkene im Frühling
(The drunkard in springtime)
Der Abschied (The farewell)

Gustav Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1908, at an isolated inn near Toblach (modern Dobiacco) in the South Tyrol. Along with his wife Alma and their surviving daughter Anna he’d rented an apartment on the top floor, but he needed peace to work and so he retreated, each day, to the forest behind the house. “Three pianos would arrive each year in springtime and had to be installed in the little summer house in the pine woods, five minutes from the inn” recalled the landlord’s daughter Marianna Trenkel:

"There he spent most of his day, disturbed by no-one - not even his wife. At dawn his breakfast had to be laid out: tea, coffee, butter, honey, eggs, rolls, fruit and poultry. Director Mahler would start work at 6am. There was a stove in the hut; he would light it himself and prepare his meal on it…"

It wasn’t entirely peaceful, though, even in this secluded Alpine valley:

"Once a vulture chased a raven directly into Mahler’s work room…another time it was our cockerel that woke him too early. ‘How can I stop it crowing?’ he asked. ‘Ah, well’, said Herr Trenker, ‘you’ll just have to wring its neck’. But Mahler would not hear of that."

His work that summer focused on The Chinese Flute, by the German poet Hans Bethge – a recently-published anthology inspired by ancient Chinese poetry. Mahler was as sensitive to literature as he was to nature, and something in the poems spoke to him. They dealt with beauty, with intense emotion crystallised into startling images; above all, they spoke of transience. It was no coincidence that the Mahlers had come to Toblach. They had fled there the previous summer after the sudden death, from scarlet fever, of their eldest daughter Maria. Mahler, too (aged just 47) had been diagnosed with life-threatening heart disease.

Mahler completed Das Lied von der Erde in 1909, and never heard it performed (it was premiered in Munich in November 1911, six months after his death). Outwardly, it was a song-cycle – a setting for contralto and tenor of six of Bethge’s poems, accompanied by a large, colourful orchestra. But for many early hearers, it felt more like listening to one of Mahler’s symphonies. And as one of Mahler’s last completed works, it acquired a certain aura. Alma maintained that Mahler saw Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony (his ninth) made up of songs – but refused to call it one because of a superstitious fear that no major composer had lived long after completing their ninth symphony. Beethoven and Bruckner seemed to prove the point.

Is Das Lied von der Erde a sequence of songs, or a symphony? The only valid answer, then or now, is how it feels to you. And is it (as many listeners have concluded) a meditation on mortality, inspired (at least in part) by Mahler’s own personal tragedies and fears for the future? That’s impossible to deny, especially in the desolate Der Einsame im Herbst and the final, heartrending sunset-song, Der Abschied. But fear of death, after all, springs from a love of life, and Das Lied von der Erde is filled with the urgency and joy of life at its most vivid. It tingles: there’s an almost physical thrill in the opening horn call (or is it a cock-crow?) of Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde.

It glitters and glows (listen to the quiet, magical strumming of the mandolin in Der Abschied), and it melts with sweetness and light (Von der Schönheit). There’s humour too, both playful (Von der Jugend) and knowing (Der Trunkene im Frühling). “I fill my cup again / And drain it to the dregs / And sing until the moon shines bright / In the black firmament” sings the unnamed drunkard of that fifth song, and Mahler’s music surges in ecstasy. This is the music of a man who had known unbearable sorrow, but who could still relish the taste of fresh honey and strong coffee on a summer morning. Das Lied von der Erde is the sound of an artist filling his cup and singing with heart and soul, even while the moon rises in the darkening sky.

© Richard Bratby