Royal Concertgebouw, Jansons, Barbican

There’s simply no orchestral sound quite like it. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had barely done a bar of Bedřich Smetana’s overture to The Bartered Bride before I found myself grinning like a fool. It was as if I had stepped off a plane and walked into a bath of fresh foreign sun. The biting cold of winter had temporarily lifted for those who had made it to the Barbican this weekend. Spring had come early.

 

The rush of notes and folksy flavours of the Czech overture probably would have added glow to our cheeks no matter who had delivered them. But there’s a big difference between a hot toddy and a dazzling flood of spring light. There is a structural depth to the warmth of this orchestra. The energy is there in every section, bubbling and bursting away like the surface of the sun.

A boogie-woogie brilliance coursed its way across the instrumental divide, like a forest fire, in the Smetana. It was taught and springy, each agogic accent delivered with a single economical twist of the Jansons baton. An opening to be very, very proud of. Which they seemed to be. I was smiling; they were smiling. I felt the world was smiling.

Martinů wasn’t smiling. He has his moments, Martinu, when a wry curl of the mouth does chance across his face, but the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani is not one of them. This is Martinů in film noir mode, in which small skulking musical cells play a game of high-risk hide-and-seek. Even when all hell breaks loose, it is a stark, spare shoot-out of internalised fear and rage. This is a work of Hitchcockian close-ups, sweaty brows and flitting eyes, that delivers alienation by flirting with familiarity: four-square rhythms and Tchaikovsky-like piano-mermaiding through thick string seas.

They were the only clouds in the two programmes. Mahler’s Second Symphony and Brahms’s Fourth aren’t exactly devoid of darkness, but in Jansons's hands the sunniness of both prevailed. The Brahms was broad, lusty - even when at a gallop - and beautiful. Oh so beautiful. Not self-consciously, self-regardingly, so; this was not a pretty picture. It was a resplendent voyage of cumulative power.

Communal harmony of the Brueghel sort was the binding glue. In the soft pizzicato of the second movement, never have I heard a group emote so quietly and modestly and cohesively. Only the last movement lacked something, the necessary momentum to lend it the massy power that it usually has. But maybe that wasn’t the point.

This performance wasn’t about force or power or menace. In fact, it wasn’t really "about" anything. It unfolded more like a religious revelation, a simple, generous act of communion. Here was a beautiful truth being testified to by those present.

You can do that with Brahms. Leave it be. Let it run its lusty course, like an ancient river. You can’t do that in Mahler. Mahler is a theatrical act and has to be engaged in, worked at, kneaded, sculpted and coloured each and every time it is performed - the Resurrection Symphony especially.

This classic Mahlerian journey from dark to light is the most medievally coloured of all the symphonies. The dark corners are nasty, garish places; the third movement scherzo pulls a grimly mocking face, the first appears occupied by a never-sated demon. An inner villainy must be summoned up by any orchestra determined to convince theatrically. Which is a problem if no inner villainy exists.

The kindly Concertgebouw did their best; the cellos (a instrumental focal point in this performance) got stuck in. But they never really convinced. Instead of light from dark, we got light from light. They relished the soft and seraphic passages and couldn't wait for the storms to settle. Their kindly, generous sound delivered an extraordinary lullaby-like version of the Landler second movement, Jansons giving them the gentlest of pushes and letting them swing.

And then came their moment in the final two movements, which offer earth-shattering visions of renewal through choral eruption. First came Bernarda Fink movingly combining a vulnerability and consolation in her warm, tremulous voice, foretelling an end to the troubles. Then came the resplendent London Symphony Chorus, first seated and soft, and echoed by the cellos, then standing and thunderous.

It was in these light-giving, life-enhancing final bars that the orchestra achieved a joyous consummation of their open-hearted energies. Lumpy throats and teary eyes all round.