At the Proms last week, to follow Mahler’s 3rd and 7th symphonies, S-Simon Rattle marked his final concert as Musical Director of the LSO with the 9th.

Do watch it on BBC4!!!
(radio broadcast here).

I wrote about the 9th symphony in my Mahler series soon after observing his climactic use of quintuplets, “struggling to emerge from the stone”; I reflected here on a Barbican performance last year with Daniel Harding and the Concertgebouw. The chamber arrangement, far from a mere curiosity, is also most affecting.

Mahler 9 has inhabited me since my teens, even when I wasn’t actually listening to it. How amazing to get hold of tickets—”of all the performances I’ve heard in my life,” that was one of them—no really, it’s always overwhelming, but nothing could be so as Rattle bidding farewell to London with this symphony, the LSO in fabulous form. Yet again, conducting from memory made the occasion even more intense. The Prommers extended the silence of the long final Abschied.

* * *

S-Simon began the concert with Poulenc’s challenging Figure humaine, an a cappella hymn to Liberté from occupied France to texts by Paul Éluard. It was brilliantly sung by the BBC Singers, who gave the first performance in 1945. Rattle began another Mahler concert with the piece in April this year, in solidarity with protests over the philistine government’s threat to axe the choir—his speech then is well worth reading.