Classical review: Gustav Mahler Jurgendorchester, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

By KEN WALTON
Published on 27/08/2012 00:00

SO FAR as youth orchestras go, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester is up there with the gods. That was the impression they gave us 13 years ago in a momentous Edinburgh Festival debut that featured Mahler’s Symphony No 7.

Gustav Mahler Jurgendorchester

Usher Hall

Star rating: * * * * *

Last night, Daniele Gatti conducted them in the same work, and the result was no less exhilarating.

It all began, though, with the Prelude to Act III and Good Friday Music from Wagner’s Parsifal, and a performance so breathlessly beautiful, effortlessly virtuosic and spiritually uplifting, it set the scene perfectly for Mahler’s emotional rollercoaster.

For it was in the symphony that we witnessed a level of interpretational detail you rarely hear from professional bands, never mind one as young as this. Right from the start – the brazen tenor horn call, underpinned by threatening rhythms in the strings – Gatti shaped a performance that was kaleidoscopic in texture and ripe in characterisation, and which, in the central movements, realised Mahler’s cut-glass orchestral dissections with chilling surgical precision.

When it came to the finale, with its multiple climaxes and ultimate ecstatic cacophony, the thrills were genuinely electrifying. So much so that Gatti’s final thrust of the baton saw it fly from his hands as if possessed. Magic.