NY Times, 15 September 1999

   All of Mahler Fills Berlin With Sound
   By PAUL GRIFFITHS

   BERLIN -- In this city in the making, where cranes fill the air
   and whole streets are impassable while block after block is rebuilt
   from the ground up, a lot of remembering is also going on.  The 10th
   anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall is being celebrated as if
   the city were a young child, and yet it retains, like a split brain,
   two strong sets of memories from the decades before the rejoicing of
   1989.  Reaching further back to before the division, books, plays
   and exhibitions re-examine the Hitler years again and again.

   It is a good time to listen to Mahler, whose music so much evokes
   hope and warning: it can be heard almost every night this month at
   the Philharmonie as the Berlin Festival runs through the composer's
   entire output.  Not only are all his symphonies and songs being
   performed by front-rank conductors, orchestras and soloists, but also
   his juvenalia, his orchestration of Weber's opera "The Three Pintos"
   and some of the other scores he adapted.  There will even be an
   opportunity to hear the songs and symphonic movements he recorded on
   player-piano rolls.

   Among the events of the festival's opening days last week was Sir
   Simon Rattle's first concert here since the announcement three months
   ago that he is to succeed Claudio Abbado as chief conductor of the
   Berlin Philharmonic, though on this occasion he conducted the Vienna
   Philharmonic.  The concert was much anticipated, and thronged.  And
   Sir Simon lived up to every expectation with an urgent, vivid and
   musically replete performance of Mahler's Second or "Resurrection"
   Symphony.

   Right from the opening, marked by extraordinarily precise and intense
   articulation from cellos and double basses, it was clear that the
   musicians were being encouraged and enabled to speak their parts as
   if delivering lines in a drama, with variety, close attention and
   abundant feeling.  There were wonderful things later from everybody
   but especially from the first flute and first piccolo and from the
   entire brass section, which made the dissonances at the climax of
   the first movement firm and fierce.

   In this movement and again in the Scherzo, which was so fantastical
   in this performance, Sir Simon often went for sharp contrasts of
   texture and tempo but always in the interests of struggling progress.
   Slow, soft sections were not just interludes or withdrawals; the work
   of the music went on.

   The supremely warm and decisive contralto Birgit Remmert brought the
   human voice into the symphony and was joined by the soprano Juliane
   Banse, in lustrous form, and the Ernst Senff Choir in a finale that
   brought the work home and at the same time had it lifting into the
   air.  The choral singing ranged from the most intimate whisper to
   full-throated exultation.

   One might have thought the Philharmonie could contain no more sound
   than it did in this performance, but two nights later Abbado filled
   it even fuller in the finale to the Seventh Symphony, for which the
   Mahler Youth Orchestra, Germany's foremost student ensemble, boasted
   a row of massive church bells.

   The Seventh Symphony is much tougher to present than the Second.  It
   tells a more complicated story, and only half a story at that, for
   it starts as if in the middle of something, which would have to be
   the narrative that had seemed to reach an exhaustive conclusion in
   the Sixth Symphony.  "Or how about this?" the orchestra appears to
   be saying as the Seventh begins.  Something provisional about the
   entire next hour of music makes the triumphant finale sound unearned,
   even glib.  Abbado did not avoid this, but his steady approach gave
   the young players plenty of opportunities to make the music sing and
   shine.

Scott Morrison