Bulldozing the ruins

MUSIC Mahler Festival Barbican, London

Bold spirits dominated last Wednesday's Mahler Festival concert at the Barbican. First, Schumann eased us through three variegated Fantasiestcke, warmly traced by clarinettist Andrew Marriner and pianist Hamish Milne. Next came Pierre Boulez with Eclat, a sort of musical light-show in a cave full of stalactites: delicate, manic but ultimately moving. The young Daniel Harding exhibited a Rattle-like command of instrumental texture and the LSO followed him all the way. And what a dazzling array of sonorities: piano, tubular bells, celesta, glockenspiel, cimbalom, plus strings and winds.

Then came Mahler's Seventh. Why this particular sequence? Easy. Schumann bounds back towards the end of the symphony's finale (in teasing quotation); as for Boulez, just sample the Scherzo, second "Nachtmusik" or Finale, and the parallel is both clear and pertinent. Mahler's Seventh bulldozes the ossifying structures of symphonic late-Romanticism, then uses the shattered fragments to help build a bolder, darker and more daring music. And while Boulez admits an exotic cimbalom into his textural vocabulary, Mahler employs guitar, mandolin, sinister muted brass and an ear-splitting barrage of percussion. It's a disquieting world and this performance was a rousing tour de force, aided by magnificent playing from the LSO. Michael Tilson Thomas was careful to hold things in check, pushing the tempo, effecting unceremonious transitions and projecting Mahler's multi- faceted sound canvas almost as if it were by Strauss. The results were hair-raising if occasionally humourless.

By contrast, Sunday's performance of the Ninth Symphony featured a particularly seamless, well-argued first movement and a finale that, for sheer passion and executive lustre, recalled Leonard Bernstein. The middle movements, too, were clearly focused and brilliantly played, although the second movement's Lndler aspects were somewhat lacking in rustic inflection.

The concert opened with Toru Takemitsu's Ceremonial and the wistful fluting of a Japanese sho (reed pipes), heard initially from the wings, then closer to hand as soloist Ko Ishikawa arrived on stage in full costume. At first, the LSO sat silently by, but within a minute or so they were adding an exquisitely arranged aural backdrop, part Messiaenic, part reminiscent of John Williams's better Spielberg soundtracks.

And then came Dame Moura Lympany's brave shot at Weber's hyperactive Konzertstck, where a hectic Keystone Cops-style Presto Assai prompted a wide range of keyboard acrobatics. Perhaps others would have generated more panache and dynamic colouring, but it was gratifying to watch Lympany's current state of pianistic good health. Long may it continue.