More on Mahler

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony came and went in Scotland last week, winning just enough attention from the press to suggest that music criticism is not yet dead in Britain  The RSNO’s performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with their grand array of Scottish choirs, clearly merited as much acclaim as they received.  But was it enough?  This, after all, was the work which, at one time, reviewers travelled across Europe to hear, ready to weep at the sound of it, because the music was so rare and so special that newspapers wanted their reviews passionately delivered from the hands of star writers.     

Today it’s still special, though perhaps no longer quite such a rarity that every performance is automatically written about. On this occasion, the Herald and Scotsman were present, as they should have been, but The Scotsman sent a freelance contributor and only one London paper appears to have sent someone north  at a time when the London press plays, or thinks it does, a dominant role in Scotland. But the Sundays have yet to give voice, so there may be more to come.   

When the RSNO first performed Mahler’s Eighth at the 1965 Edinburgh Festival. the performance rightly won international attention. The work had not been heard in Scotland before. It was the first time the RSNO had been invited to give the opening concert, and it marked the debut of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. The final rehearsal was thrown open to the public. Predictably, the finished product was comprehensively reviewed. 

In celebration, the performance was repeated by the same forces the following year, when one London critic wrote that he had timed it and had found, to its disadvantage, that it ran slightly shorter than the previous one, which is perhaps why every performance it receives is somehow slightly less sensational, and perhaps slightly less newsworthy, than the one before. 

And more than ever, perhaps, the performance of a work - any work - has to be newsworthy, or it risks being ignored. Music criticism, they say, is a dying art which, in America, is already as good as dead. All the signs are that death throes are evident here also.  I’m glad I was most  active as a critic in the second half of the twentieth century, when we were all having what now looks like our last fling.  It was not that classical music mattered more at that time, though it mattered a lot;   but classical music criticism, as it now has to be called to differentiate it from everything else, certainly did. 

6 June 2014