Simon Rattle conducted a concert in the Barbican Hall on Sunday for the BBC Singers event where Mahler’s Seventh and Richard Strauss’s ‘Don Quixote’ was played.
The BBC Singers, a top-tier professional chorus has recently been threatened with extermination but then it was paused and reprieved. In the evening, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony was supposed to be the evening’s solo performance, however, the outrage was so big and threatening, that the LSO invited the now-reprieved BBC Singers to perform. As a gesture of solidarity, LSO was made to invite the singers to the concert led by outrage over the threat to the generous amount of UK singers in the country’s classical music scene.
In the interval, Simon Rattle protested and said how “the Arts Council’s swingeing cuts in November” and “the proposed vandalism by the BBC” impacted the artists and their musical lives in the UK. He then angrily made another statement saying, that the “political ignorance of what this art form entails” and the “stubborn pride in that ignorance” weighed heavily on the part of those who have wreaked such devastation and damage. Although Poulenc’s piece carries extensive symbolic resonance itself, as it was written under Nazi occupation from 1943 to 1944, in secret. As an iconic work, it sets for “two a cappella six-part choruses” by Paul Éluard. Initially, Poulenc considered the French choir for this but given the complexity of the vocal writing, he handed it out to the BBC Singers, who were also known as the BBC Chorus. They gave their first performance in March of 1945.
The entire performance was sheer excellence as the singing was a reminder of their distinction as musical interpreters and their eminence as an orchestra. Rattle gave the musical space to dissonances without hampering the momentum. The emotional trajectory in the performance was done with fierce intelligence from quiet anger to prodigious closure with a mighty demand for freedom. Mahler’s Seventh had an opening moment that was nothing short of a rollercoaster ride with moments of pure beauty, contrasts, and mood swings. Rattle’s command in this score was absolute and the interpretation was completely created on the tempi, giving the performers enough space to play and maintaining the sense of momentum. The strings, both upper and lower eloquent, especially when they needed to respond to the conductor’s entreaties were impressive. The finale, which was so often labeled problematic, was indeed a rampage of colors, where Rattle beautifully controlled the “rhetorical ritardando”.
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