Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic's London residency closed with Mahler's Third Symphony, one of music's grandest statements.
Conceived on the greatest of scales, it attempts to portray the entire universe, beginning with raw matter and ending with God, or love, which to Mahler was the same thing. The most ambitious of his symphonies, it is also his most diffuse. Interpretations that forge a consistent unity from it are rare.
Rattle's performance, though formidable, wasn't absolutely ideal. The playing was beyond criticism. Rattle's well-known fondness for detail was greatly in evidence, and often perfectly attuned to a work that teems with a sense of life's myriad forms and possibilities.
The first movement heaved and surged, as if inchoate matter was gradually assuming shape. The fourth movement, suggesting human alienation in a divinely appointed universe, found Nathalie Stutzmann intoning the Nietzsche setting like some hieratic androgyne over wailing oboe portamentos and perfectly judged instrumental undulations. And the finale was admirably controlled, avoiding the blowsiness that sometimes mars it.
Yet there were a handful of slips. The minuet was too cloying for my taste. The posthorn solo that stops the gambolling scherzo in its tracks was short on its ambiguous mix of nostalgia and eeriness. And in the fifth movement, Stutzmann was fractionally less inspired when breaking the Ten Commandments than in her earlier meditation on Nietzsche.
Rattle prefaced it with an couple of curtain-raisers that weren't really necessary – Brahms's Es tönt ein voller Harfenklang, for female chorus, harp and horn, and Hugo Wolf's Elfenlied, again for female chorus, this time with soprano (a metallic-sounding Anke Hermann) and orchestra.
The BBC Singers performed them with considerable charm. They were joined in the symphony by the women of London Symphony Chorus and the choir of Eltham College, who sang with fervent richness of tone.