Vocal qualities matter enormously. Not just when it comes to the process of casting in the opera house, but when radically different items are programmed together in concert. I have to admit I had considerable misgivings when I saw Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder matched with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in this concert given by the London Symphony Orchestra and its Conductor Emeritus, Sir Simon Rattle. Mahler requires in his final movement a fresh and essentially innocent voice to portray a vision of heaven, whereas the work by Strauss represents a leave-taking, a nostalgic reminiscence of life itself and an acceptance of death. Is it possible to square this particular circle using one and the same voice? Though great artists are capable of doing justice to both works in concert by using appropriate vocal colouring, there is something disconcerting when hearing a matronly soprano assaying the Mahler or a much too jejune singer for the Strauss. Horses for courses, one might say in ungallant vein. So how did I respond to Lucy Crowe as soloist for both?
To begin with the overall verdict: more effective in the Mahler, I think, than in the Strauss. Crowe is to be commended for singing the four songs from memory (though she needed a score for the Mahler), not something that can be taken for granted these days. There was also an effective use of body language, especially in the third stanza of Beim Schlafengehen, where the passionate intensity in her voice was enhanced by a finely spun violin solo from Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. Here, Crowe’s bright upper register served her well as she detailed the journey of the soul, soaring effortlessly into the heavens, with the celesta evoking the starry sky above.
The most testing tessitura comes in the very first song, Frühling, stretching from a middle C to a B above the stave. Three things bothered me about Crowe’s presentation of Hermann Hesse’s text: an intrusive vibrato that robbed some of the lines of their focus, an absence of clear articulation and a degree of forcefulness at odds with the prevailing mood of reflection. Crowe’s top line was always secure, but it was in the second song, September, where I became aware of weaknesses in her lower register. This was apparent in the second line, “Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen” with its reference to rain soaking into the ground, and especially in the phrase “sehnt sich nach Ruh”, where the garden’s energies are draining away and it yearns for peace. The depths were merely hinted at rather than being adequately plumbed.
One thing that any good Strauss soprano needs above all is evenness of line. This was more evident in the final two songs, and whenever the dynamics were at a lower setting there was a Mozartian elegance to the way Crowe sang. Strauss gives the orchestra sufficient moments to shine between the songs, so the manner of the accompaniment is crucial. In the final song, Im Abendrot, its function is to unfold a carpet of velvet on which the voice can tread with confidence. Rattle used a full complement of strings and indulged a little too much in the opulence of the writing and the panoramic sound of the LSO players. At the start they sounded far too bright with little of the darker colouration, and indeed heartache, that this music demands. At no stage should the listener feel that the orchestra is competing with, rather than supporting, the solo voice.
When it comes to Mahler, Rattle’s credentials are not in doubt. After one complete recorded cycle, he is now revisiting some of the symphonies with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has lived and breathed in this music for a lifetime, and his concern for textures and sonorities was apparent throughout. In the first movement of this Fourth Symphony there was a high degree of tempo flexibility, whilst respecting the composer’s repeated injunctions not to hurry, yet when Rattle did push forward I felt it was entirely in keeping with a mood of childlike exuberance and excited touch of discovery. There was a distinctly rustic and indeed bucolic feel to the playing, with prominence given to the burbling and gurgling woodwind.
In the second movement, vibrant horn playing by Timothy Jones complemented the dovetailing of the string lines, crowned by the sophistication of Gilmore’s playing of the scordatura line for the solo violin, Mahler’s reference to the mistuned fiddle of the skeletal figure of death.
I liked the way Rattle kept the pauses between the movements to an absolute minimum, so that a keen sense of organic flow was properly maintained. He and his players achieved a floating sensation in the slow third movement, where the composer’s basic marking of “Ruhevoll” (restful) was an ideal antidote to the stresses and strains of modern life. Rattle drew on his wonderfully dark-hued and resonant viola section, positioned on the conductor’s right, to give additional inner depth to the string polyphony.
Crowe, having exchanged her shimmering white gown in the Strauss for a sparkling jade green creation in the Mahler, was very much at home in the texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn that conclude the symphony. The brightness of her soprano and the predominance of the writing for the upper register meant that she easily conveyed the composer’s instruction in the score, “to be sung with childlike, cheerful expression, entirely without parody”. The soaring qualities in her voice transported the listener to a never-never land, in which the imagination could roam free, with the merest of agogic hesitations adding point and emphasis to the already vivid lines of the text. She was especially animated in all four stanzas, with dramatic facial expressions and judicious body language gracing her delivery.
As so often in Mahler, irony is just a heartbeat away. This work presents no uniform picture of a peaceful paradise, a heavenly land of milk and honey, though such references do exist. Here we also have an abattoir in the sky, where innocent lambs and oxen are slaughtered. By the time the final stanza is reached, with its “Kein’ Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden, die unsrer verglichen werden kann“, a suggestion that no music on earth can justifiably be compared to the heavenly strains above, with Rattle’s now much softer accompaniment in synchrony with the still quietness of Crowe’s voice, the listener is left questioning the veracity of the basic statement. To put it in Theodor Adorno’s words, nothing is as it seems in this superficially seraphic symphony.
Taken together, the Strauss and Mahler would have been sufficient. However, Rattle chose to preface them with one of his early loves, Roberto Gerhard’s Symphony No. 3 (Collages). It made for a strange opener to an evening steeped in Romanticism, but is evidence of Rattle’s wide eclectic interests. Not an amuse-bouche, not a palate cleanser either, but a heavy initial dose of astringency. The twenty-minute piece teems with ideas, though they are rarely properly developed, and the varying sonorities, with a vast array of percussion complete with electronic tape, enabled the LSO to display its corporate virtuosity to the full. I was left pondering at the very French-sounding characteristics of much of the writing: a Ravel-like clarity and precision, the dance-like whimsical rhythms favoured by Poulenc and the heady exoticism of Messiaen. Music, as so often, is full of surprises.
Alexander Hall
Roberto Gerhard, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler
Gerhard: Symphony No. 3 “Collages”; Strauss: Four Last Songs; Mahler: Symphony No. 4
Lucy Crowe (soprano); London Symphony Orchestra, conductor Sir Simon Rattle
Barbican Hall, London, 21 May 2026
Photos © Mark Allan