Royal Festival Hall, London
The use of period instruments may not revolutionise the performance of late romantic orchestral music in the way it has the baroque and classical repertory over the last 30 years, but it is still fascinating to hear such music played by the forces that composers of the era would have taken for granted. In Vladimir Jurowski's programme with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, works by Wagner, Mahler and Liszt were viewed through that historical prism, with the OAE bulked up with quadruple wind matched to a string section founded on eight double basses.
The prelude to the first act of Parsifal and Liszt's symphonic poem Les Pr�ludes framed the programme. The former was more concerned with sinewy lines and less with shifting planes of homogenous orchestral sound than it is with a traditional orchestra, though to hear that music exactly as Wagner imagined, it would need the covered pit of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The latter sounded as brazenly bombastic as usual, even though Jurowski sifted its instrumental colours.
Yet it was the two works by Mahler that proved the most fascinating. In Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, sung by Sarah Connolly with her usual care and attention to detail, the lean textures seemed to sharpen the irony and the anguish of the songs. The symphonic poem Totenfeier, the original version of what became the first movement of the Resurrection Symphony, had an irresistible sweep. Jurowski ensured all its details, some of them strikingly different from the final version, made their point: from the macabre funeral march at the beginning to the insistent cymbal clashes that drive it to a climax. Even then, you realise, Mahler was a symphonic composer like none before him.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jan/24/orchestra-of-the-age-of-enlightenment-jurowski-review
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