An unforgettable evening: Mahler's First, on 23 March, with the house orchestra and conductor Fabio Luisi at the helm. I dare say it was the most gripping and complete Mahler Et in the orchestra's history. We will come back to this. Same year (2017), same hall, same composer. Now, 14 days later, and the same retired flutist sat in roughly the same balcony seat, but this time with Mahler's Fourth and with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of their chief conductor, Alan Gilbert. There was a basis for some kind of analysis, not as a music critic would do, but based on two key questions: how does the hall's acoustics respond to the two elite orchestras? Are there any differences and secondly, what do the New Yorkers think of our new hall.
But first back to Luisi and Mahler's first. A spring evening with fantastic, deep blue cloud formations over Amager Fælled and an evening sun with spears of fire that flashed like an omen of the high drama we were about to experience. And let it be said right away, if anyone had any doubts about Maestro Luisi's leadership skills, everything was put in place, in the orchestra as well as in our, the audience's consciousness. An orchestra and a conductor on the eve of a major US tour and with the Mahler Symphony as the main work.
I remember the first time Luisi met the orchestra six or seven years ago. We were rehearsing a programme for a Spanish music festival. In other words, we were not going to perform in Copenhagen, but only in Santander. During the rehearsal, at a certain point at the end of Mahler's first, our first violins had to make a dramatic interval shift from a low note to a high note. Luisi broke off: ”That's fine, yes, it's quite brilliant what you're doing - art pause - ”but... it's NOT ENOUGH! In what followed, a sigh went through the entire orchestra. Never before had you heard the already highly competent first violins play with such fervour.
During the first few days in the new concert hall, there was a feeling that the sonic conditions in this hall were not quite right. You could feel strangely undressed. At the time, I had the opportunity to talk to Chief Acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota about the reverberation. Wasn't the reverberation a little too short? The small, slightly wind-dry man looked at me for a long time and then answered my direct question: ”No, but wait... the hall will teach the orchestra to play better”.
We have to admit that the professor ended up being right. They may have made some adjustments, such as puttying a large number of reverberation-cancelling holes in the walls and ceiling, but the hall's unique acoustics are now, as in the beginning, of the same kind. As a musician, it's easy to be unsure. How much should I give? How much is coming out? But the quirk of the hall, in my opinion, is that it reproduces what we produce without any loss of overtones or ”playing noise”. This is very special.
In traditional concert halls, and especially in the classical box office (like two cubes placed in a row, such as Music centre in Vienna), there is a loss of overtones in the sound as well as a reduction of the playing noise that is part of the sound's carrying capacity. The harmony that reaches the audience is therefore polished and, as a result of hall reflections, with quite a bit of extra reverb added. And it is precisely in the absence of this that the hall at Amager has taught DRSO's musicians about the pure, unadorned beauty of sound in space, both in solo and group playing and in the aforementioned violin passage, because the hall may be sensitive, but it can take unlimited amounts of power.
In the New York Philharmonic, one of the more high-profile members is principal flutist Robert Langevin, a man in his late sixties with a drooping moustache, a very relaxed attitude and, above all, a master of his instrument and a musician with his ears on stalks. ”We've been travelling around Europe for the past few weeks,” he says. Experienced concert halls in Vienna, London, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam and, as something special, played in the new Elb-Philharmonie in Hamburg.” We might add that Hamburg's new billion-euro hall also has the same Professor Toyota as its acoustician.
”The whole concert hall construction in Hamburg is extremely spectacular,” says Robert. ”The hall's acoustics are very ”alive”, and in a work like Mahler's Fourth, all the orchestra's voices come into their own. On the other hand, it struggles to cope with the big blasts, as we experienced in a work by John Adams (The Chairman Dancing) with heavy brass. Mahler's Fourth has no trombones and tuba, and it's all very transparent.”.
So how did the New Yorkers settle in Amager? Robert Langevin told me about it after the orchestra's second concert with Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique:
”After the two concerts, my colleagues and I agree that the hall has a perfect balance in its reverberation and that it gave us the opportunity to hear each other and play together between the groups, both disappearing in the harmony and at other times being heard solo. The sound is natural and you can play as delicate and soft as possible and still be present. There's an intimate atmosphere and you never feel the audience is far away.”.
I also asked Robert Langevin if Fabio Luisi had been considered as the orchestra's new chief conductor, and he replied that he had simply not been engaged as a guest conductor, but that perhaps a great opportunity had been missed. The orchestra's next conductor is Dutch conductor Jap van Zweden.
As an experienced colleague and despite Robert's praise to the audience, I sensed that the American two-piece orchestra initially felt their way around, and for some of the wind soloists they never quite settled in. Now you have to remember that the orchestra was on the road. Copenhagen was the last stop on the tour. They arrived at the Marriott hotel around two o'clock on the day of the concert, and by 7.30pm they had to be world-class and without a care in the world again.
Undeniably, the orchestra had also created a few obstacles for themselves. Firstly Bartok's music for strings garnished with percussion, harp, piano and celeste. The strings are placed opposite each other in two orchestras and must follow each other with millimetre precision - but with a distance of 30 metres between the two double bass groups, for example. The solution was exemplary, but only after a few minutes, when the nature of the hall must have taken everyone involved by surprise, because EVERYTHING is heard here!
Playing Mahler's Fourth, which is characterised by many changes in tempo as well as in expression, was an extra self-created challenge. There are no direct gains here, but everything must be achieved with elegance and vigour. It all ends in piano and in delicate thinning. It's an old saying (John Frandsen) that you must not end a concert with Brahms’ Third or Mahler's Fourth and for the same reason. The applause quickly dies down. But we - the audience - knew how to appreciate the world-famous orchestra that had played Mahler's first four symphonies in the early 1900s, including this evening's work, with the composer himself as conductor. Leonard Bernstein's orchestra, yes, the top four in the world by the recognised Michelin-like standards.
One might dare to whisper that the orchestra's outgoing chief conductor Alan Gilbert, who had led Bartok so precisely, seemed less convincing with Mahler. Virtuosity is not the issue here, and the two New York-based conductors probably made the real difference between the two performances of Mahler at Amager. Two brilliant orchestras, but with Fabio Luisi as the one who got our pulse racing in the first balcony, eighth row.
