Just over a decade ago it was predicted by those supposedly in the know that Ilan Volkov would succeed Sakari Oramo as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the event, the gig went to Andris Nelsons, and it was probably for the best. An artistic temperament as inquisitive and uncompromising as Volkov’s probably wouldn’t have been well suited to the box-ticking and base-touching involved in planning full length seasons for an orchestra with the CBSO's civic responsibilities. Which is not to say that the orchestra doesn’t have a noticeable rapport with Volkov – or, indeed, that any orchestra wouldn’t benefit from regular visits from a conductor who gets his kicks from pairing (as Volkov plans to do in Glasgow next March) Brahms’s German Requiem with Luigi Nono’s Per Bastiana Tai-Yang Cheng.
In short, Volkov’s programmes are never less than thought provoking, and in Birmingham we heard his solution to the eternal problem of what to pair with Mahler's Ninth Symphony – namely, to preface that last testament of Viennese romanticism with two central European composers from the generation that should, in a less terrible world, have succeeded Mahler. Gideon Klein and Hans Krása were both murdered in the Holocaust, and Krása’s Overture for Small Orchestra was actually written in the camp at Theresienstadt. No amount of brisk Stravinskian bustle and brightly clattering piano can quite help the music break clear of the horror hanging over it, and it ends on a quiet but devastating open question. Volkov set about it purposefully, relishing its surprisingly bright palette of colours. There are no basses, pairs of clarinets and trumpets are the entire wind complement, and at one point the strings skittered,col legno across the score like a swarm of fireflies.
Klein’s Partita for String Orchestra is a weightier score, and the dominant voice here is Janáček. Volkov made the most of its bristling rhythmic ostinatos, lit by sudden surges of sunlit lyricism. But he seemed strangely detached in the melancholy central movement, a set of variations on a Moravian folk song. The phrasing felt a little constrained: would that have been the case if the piece had been performed by the forces for which Klein originally wrote it – a string trio? This arrangement for string orchestra dates from the Nineties, and while no-one can question the necessity of putting Klein’s music in front of the widest possible audience, I wonder whether the music itself might not be better served in its original form.
As for the Mahler; well, you don’t expect Bernsteinish emotional indulgence from Ilan Volkov, and from the opening bars – clearly placed, crisply articulated – it was very clear that we weren’t going to get it. Volkov assembled the symphony’s textures as if they were by Webern: constructivist rather than expressionist, with little room for the sentimental or the numinous. No languishing sighs or fading heartbeats here. Quaver upbeats were snapped smartly into place and muted horn pedals crisscrossed the first movement’s huge structure like girders. The gains in terms of transparency were striking: flute motifs were audible through surging tuttis and the harps became load-bearing elements of the musical argument, rather than glittering ornaments. Adolf Loos would have approved.
The two inner movements shared the same forceful clarity. Volkov refused to indulge the musical stereotypes – ländler, Habsburg regimental bands, Strauss waltzes – that Mahler so brilliantly appropriates. Instead, the motivic argument continued, occasionally underlined with the brilliant neon marker of the glockenspiel and Joanna Patton’s fearless E flat clarinet, plus blocks of thick black felt-tip from the brass. But the problem with Volkov’s decision to use the orchestra as a source of texture and colour rather than letting emotion have its head (the strings, in particular, played throughout with as much expression as Volkov would allow them) was particularly pronounced in movements that rely so much on a sense of extramusical meaning. More contrast might have been helpful; the music didn’t always sound as if it knew where it was headed.
Which left a lot hanging on the finale, and here, too, Volkov was uncompromising. Not for Volkov the protracted, tearstained death-song; instead, he shaped a massive contrapuntal cortège, coolly but powerfully sustained, making full use of Mahler’s massive silences, and crowned by a final cadence that – hushed as it was – nonetheless sounded like a logical and decisive QED rather than a breathless fade to black. Only a masochist would want to hear every Mahler Nine played this way, but I’m glad to have heard this one. And since shameless milking of the final silence has practically become an Olympic sport for conductors, I’m also glad to have seen what Volkov did after the final note. He simply closed the score and gestured to the orchestra to stand up.