Thorvaldsdottir, Schumann and Mahler: an ambitious programme that brings together three strikingly different musical worlds. With Anna Vinnitskaya as soloist, the Belgian National Orchestra (BNO) and Matthew Halls on the podium, one seemed to have everything in hand for a memorable evening. Yet something essential was missing.
From loose details to a missed big picture
This became immediately apparent with Aeriality by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (°1977), a thin and esoteric piece that mainly seems to last long and begins to bore as it progresses. Apart from a beautiful, lyrical contribution from the strings, there was little left that managed to hold the attention. If this work was meant to be my introduction to the oeuvre of the composer in residence, it unfortunately had the opposite effect.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856) then. Here too mainly loose components: much attention to details, hardly a big picture. Yet the musicians clearly had more to offer – the woodwinds played beautifully, the cellos let the dark undertone be heard nicely in the first two movements. Vinnitskaya played competently, but her contribution was largely lost in that accompaniment. Schumann's Piano Concerto is more than a succession of beautiful details: it also has romantic glow and tension, and there was little room for that in this performance. In the finale, the orchestra may well become quieter, but when you can barely hear it, something is wrong with the balance.
Between slowness and excess
And then Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), where the same problem repeated itself throughout. The first movement was set so agonisingly slowly that it almost began to hurt. You could hear that the orchestra wanted to move forward, but the conductor kept a tight rein – slowness only works if it creates tension, here it mainly created waiting. Also the klezmer-like passages, which run through the entire symphony, were strongly profiled. Mahler weaves those traits with irony into his symphonic language, but whoever presents them too prominently as 'klezmer' makes something forced of it.
The second movement was at least played with conviction. With kräftig bewegt, it may well sound robust, but despite doch nicht so schnell, the whole thing sounded too heavy. The third movement started uncertainly and not entirely pure, although fortunately there was drive in it, ohne zu schleppen; a beautiful passage for harp and strings provided a moment of refinement. For a moment there was hope.
That hope disappeared in the finale, where all orchestral force was immediately deployed. There was hardly any sense of dosage: the loud passages were even accelerated towards the end, precisely the recipe for an audience that is impressed and applauds loudly. Only: should Mahler depend on that?
At the end, moreover, trumpet and trombone stood upright to play next to the horns – that was not necessary at all, while Mahler prescribes that effect only for the horns. The ending thus became a true brass demonstration in which the strings were completely drowned out: it had something of a decibel championship.
When interpretation gets in the way of the score
The problem did not lie with the BNO, which proved more than once this evening to have both power and sophistication in house. The problem was a conductor who, both with Schumann and Mahler, seemed to find his own reading more important than the musical logic of the score, thereby short-changing both composers and the soloist. Perhaps Halls made an excellent impression on another occasion with Beethoven, but Mahler is a different kettle of fish: it is not enough to choose tempi and enlarge extremes, you must also know when not to intervene. For me, this performance was therefore not an invitation to follow him further.
One final note, apart from the musical assessment: it can be charming when an English conductor at Bozar tries to address the audience in French. The fact that he does so exclusively is indefensible in 2026. Perhaps Halls did not know better, but that is precisely the problem: in a national cultural institution in Brussels, capital of both Belgium and Flanders, it should simply be normal for the Dutch-speaking audience to be addressed as well. That this apparently still is not taken for granted, I find unacceptable.