A performance of Gustav Mahler's 2nd Symphony can't help but be an occasion. It's 80 minutes of anguished, ultimately triumphant speculation on the meaning of life, scored for orchestra, mixed choir, two vocal soloists, organ, Chinese gongs, offstage brass and percussion and, by composer's fiat, "the largest possible contingent of strings". By the end of it, Godzilla could turn up without greatly enhancing the sense of spectacle. Beneath the gibbous moon at Al Jahili Fort on Tuesday, the violinists of the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino looked in danger of falling off the stage, so densely packed in were they. This is big music, written around still bigger themes.
In the hands of the conductor Zubin Mehta, however, the piece took on an unexpectedly restrained character. The peaks - which in Mahler's neurotic case are often really troughs - were still clearly discernible, and the towering climax was as shattering and transcendent as could be wished for. Yet Mehta's interest seemed drawn above all to the piece's lyrical, nostalgic passages, which he rendered in frank and sunny colours. He minimised the pensiveness of the first four movements; their consoling or voluptuous episodes were allowed to escape the downwards pull of mortality and exist on their own terms.
The first movement, the death celebration, opened in padding menace, with cellos grown husky as oboes. Then the pastoral swell, violins weaving through a graceful melody, breathing freely, untroubled by the shadows to come. The movement cycles through these spells of peace and optimism and other, more ominous themes, before building to one of Mahler's black ultimatums: brass ascending in giant strides to some dreadful throne, strings sliding helter-skelter down the walls. This the orchestra delivered. Gongs ushered in a nightfall of the spirit.
The second movement is nostalgic: its theme is the remembrance of the deceased, after all, and Mehta gave the past its due. In the third movement, however, the idiosyncrasy of his approach became more apparent. A restless scherzo, meant to suggest the futility of worldly employments, became in Mehta's account somehow playful. In another reading - Antoni Wit's, for instance - islands of promise keep melting away into darkness, evoking the nauseous insubstantiality of a life grown too thin to block dread out. Mehta made the thing seem capricious, almost faerie in character. Strings skittered in gauzy layers. Trumpets harrumphed. The culminating "death shriek", as Mahler called it, might have been one of excitement.
Marjana Lipovsek's powerful mezzo-soprano solo in the fourth movement was sung with an old-fashioned roundness of tone, a slightly theatrical style that gave her appeals to heaven for a release from life a kind of archaic force. The fatalistic theme brought out an ever-greater lushness of texture and detail from the orchestra, with delicate violin melodies extending like shoots, blossoming and falling away as dark shapes stirred the brass and timpani into subterranean rumbles: death approaching.
And then an unimpeachable fifth movement. Everything, so far as this reviewer could tell, went right - no small feat when one needs to synchronise an offstage brass and percussion section. From this concealed second unit's hunting blasts, to the hushed arrival of the choir, singing as if from some mist-bound Avalon, to the giddy ascent into power and glory that is perhaps Mahler's crowning achievement - the flickering oddity of his harmonies pushing the climax beyond mere triumphalism into regions of mystery - it all worked superbly. Akiko Nakajima, the second soloist, delivered her resurrection song with an apposite clarity of tone and softness of diction. The attention shown throughout the evening to sonic warmth reached its peak, brass, strings and voices resolving into that striated luminescence that, for many, is the meaning of the word "Mahlerian". For a moment, the audience was too stunned to get on their feet. But they managed it.
