BBC NOW/Bancroft review – anguished, beautiful Mahler and uplifting Schumann

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and principal conductor Ryan Bancroft expected to open their 23/24 season with the emphatic statement that is Mahler’s Third Symphony, but the temporary – fingers crossed – closure of St David’s Hall for Raac checks, meant the concert had to be scaled down for the alternative venue of Hoddinott Hall. Mahler remained though: his Kindertotenlieder made up for the disappointment and, happily, allowed the Dutch mezzosoprano Christianne Stotijn to join the orchestra as planned.

This, of course, is not a cycle suffused with happiness: Friedrich Rückert was writing about the deaths of two of his young children, and Mahler’s settings can be simply heart-rending, the more so for knowing that he too would later lose his four-year-old daughter, Maria. Yet it is the composer’s reflections on mortality – and, in life, the inevitability of death – that are so moving. Stotijn, with her gently burnished tone, sang with a compassion and expressiveness that lent a transcendent beauty, with only momentary unevenness at the top of her range betraying the emotion. Bancroft emphasised the chamber music balance of the writing for wind instruments, their interweaving threnodies setting up and then echoing the vocal narrative.

It’s only in the final song, In diesem Wetter!, that Mahler uses the whole orchestra to conjure a storm – I’d never have let the children out, rages the poet. And while it was the anguish that Stotijn conveyed here that was piercing, the calm resignation of the final orchestral postlude also offered consolation.

Works by Schumann framed the Mahler. His Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op 52 got a welcome airing, a sort of symphony without a slow movement, with much of the exuberance characteristic of his piano works of that time. After the interval, Symphony No 3, the Rhenish, seemed to carry a similar ebullience, and the orchestra, notably the brass section, had a buoyant energy. Bancroft is strong on rhythmic definition and, together with the dignified grandeur of the fourth movement, it was this ongoing sense of propulsion towards the jubilant conclusion that proved suitably uplifting.