Mahler's Resurrection Symphony has been done to death of late. Written as the 19th century drew to its jittery close, the symphony's imagery of collapse and renewal has, to some extent, given voice to our own insecurity as 2000 approaches. The work has assumed iconic, almost cultish status.
But do we really need another performance of the damn thing? Well, yes, if it's done like this. Herbert Blomstedt hasn't conducted a British orchestra in years, so it was something of a coup for the LPO both to acquire his services and to find him on such tremendous form. This was Blomstedt at his absolute best, flaying away the music's outer skin to get to the muscle and bone beneath, stripping away all the noxious accretions of sentimentality that have dogged so much Mahler conducting, favouring pared-down textures - raw, lean, sinewy, at times downright harsh.
His interpretation is shocking in its bleakness. This is less a vision of apocalypse and regeneration than a depiction of an inferno redeemed by belated divine illumination. Dante defined hell as a state in which all hope has been abandoned, and Blomstedt unleashes Mahler's opening movement with comparable despair, a relentless, measured tread that pulverises everything in its path. There's no dawdling, no wallowing rubato, and the strings' brief attempts to transcend the horror of it all sound shallow and illusory. The rest of it is equally black: the minuet is dragged down into exhausted vulnerability; Urlicht (Primeval Light) shines with a pale, stagnant gleam; the Day of Judgement is a cataclysm and even the first appearance of the resurrection hymn is tentative and disbelieving. Only when the soprano proclaims that death itself has been destroyed does the gloom finally disperse.
An alarming account of the piece, in short - and for the most part performed with terrifying conviction. One's only qualms concerned the ill-matched soloists; Solveig Kringelborn, in better voice than I've heard her for a while, was radiant in the soprano part; Nathalie Stutzmann's treacly contralto - poised somewhere between butch and earth-mother - suits neither the work, nor Blomstedt's uncompromising interpretation.
