Review | HK Phil brings Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 to life in energetic, eerie performance
Singaporean conductor Kahchun Wong skilfully led the rendition of Mahler’s complex work in a show brimming with soul and spooky eccentricity
“Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?”
Even if that line made famous by Rita’s flatmate Trish in the film version of Educating Rita is meant to satirise the pretentiousness of the intellectual class, the life-affirming nature of Gustav Mahler’s music is undeniable.
When pondering the darker, enigmatic aspects found in his Symphony No 7, however, one can only imagine how much bleaker the piece would have turned out had the Austro-Bohemian written it during the dire years after its actual completion.
Not only did Vienna’s musical public turn against Mahler, forcing both his resignation from the Vienna Court Opera and the shift of the symphony’s premiere to Prague, but he found out he had an incurable heart condition as his daughter lay on her deathbed with scarlet fever.
That aside, with some tweaks before and after its 1908 premiere to temper some of the optimism, Mahler’s five-movement journey was celebrated to the fullest on January 23 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, where Singaporean conductor Kahchun Wong led the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance that brimmed with heart, soul and spooky eccentricity.
The all-important double-dotted rhythms – the “ba-baaah” of a crisp, short note leading to a longer one – are the quasi-lifeblood of many of Mahler’s main motifs. Here, they were poignant and arresting in their execution, no more so than those delivered with laserlike precision by the trumpets, magnificently led by Nitiphum Bamrungbanthum.