Although it takes its name from the most introspective of composers, a whiff of politics has always hung over the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. Founded in Vienna by Claudio Abbado in 1986, its initial aim was to bridge east/west divides by bringing young Austrian players together with musicians from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Fifteen years on, it's become "the youth orchestra for the whole of Europe", drawing its performers, most of them in their early 20s, from colleges across the continent. It has also become a formidable ensemble. The UK leg of their Easter tour brought them to the Barbican as part of the Great Orchestras of the World series. There's no doubt that they belong there.
Given that the galvanic Mariss Jansons was at the helm, an exciting evening was inevitable. He chose Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition as the closing work, turning in a radical re-evaluation of the piece. It is usually treated as an exercise in orchestral flamboyance. Jansons, aware of the tensions and contradictions within it, probes it more deeply than most.
Mussorgsky, it should be remembered, was a depressive and an alcoholic. Despite the self-confident opening and the upbeat finale, Pictures is more nightmare than fantasy. It pre-empts surrealism, as images of horrific supernatural entities, corpses in catacombs and peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures thread their way through it. Much of the music is savage. Mussorgsky wrote the work for solo piano in 1874. Ravel's orchestration dates, however, from 1922, when humanity's violence had become all too apparent and surrealism was a dominant art form. Jansons consequently unleashes a study of orchestral weirdness, of textures at once brilliant and slippery that have the glutinous brightness of one of Salvador Dali's paintings. He leaves you in little doubt that this is actually one composer's interpretation of another's music, separated from the original by time and history. Jazz was also very much around when Ravel worked on his orchestration - and Jansons gives both the trumpet's opening Promenade and the saxophone solo that dominates The Old Castle a languorous, bluesy poise. In short, this was powerhouse stuff and, a couple of fluffs apart, it was phenomenally played.
Jansons preceded this stunner with an ebullient, well-judged performance of Weber's Euryanthe overture and the Schumann Piano Concerto. Radu Lupu was the soloist, by turns restrained, fluidly rhapsodic and elegant. The most undemonstrative of artists, he sits at the piano radiating extraordinary calm. To hear him is always both a privilege and a reminder that great piano playing need not mean self-dramatisation.
