Mahler
Symphony No. 9
Mahler Academy Orchestra
Philipp von Steinaecker
Reviewed by: David Gutman
Reviewed: 11 September, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
A late start and a single work defined this penultimate concert of the season. Unlike the so-called ‘Gershwin’ Rhapsody in Blue advertised at a previous Prom, this was indeed Mahler’s Ninth—if not quite as we know it.
Deploying period instruments in 20th-century repertoire can create fresh layers of confusion and paradox without expanding the repertoire in meaningful ways (Mahler, after all, is not Handel). Even when conducting modern bands, the late Sir Roger Norrington advocated what he called ‘pure tone’. Yet we know that Mahler, as a conductor, used string vibrato more frequently than his contemporaries, albeit not continuously; why else would his scores contain the explicit indication senza vibrato? Earlier this season we welcomed the expert musicians of Les Siècles—perhaps the oddest case of all. Widely esteemed for subtle textures and ear-tickling wind sonorities, they make no attempt to clone the raw individualism that was the hallmark of French orchestral playing into the 1960s.
The players of the Mahler Academy Orchestra (a somewhat mysterious mix of students and professionals from various European ensembles) at least go beyond merely trying to make their newly recovered, variously intractable instruments sound well. Whether the results reveal anything about performing practices circa 1910, let alone the inner substance of Mahler’s score, is another matter.
Conductor Philipp von Steinaecker, a former cellist and assistant to Claudio Abbado, has a CV that includes bringing an English-language version of Haydn’s The Creation to the South Tyrol and recording the results commercially. Now, he seems engaged in a long-term project to set down all the Mahler symphonies. That the critical response has been divided is hardly surprising: the ensemble explicitly sets out to avoid the anachronistic, Stravinskian rigidity often yoked to period practice, embracing instead a more ‘natural’ freedom.
Here, Mahler’s opening, faltering-heartbeat gestures were undeniably rethought: drenched in portamento with, as far as one could tell, limited vibrato. What followed was less an expression of ‘extreme polyphony’ than a thing of shreds and patches, with lines wandering in and out of audibility (and not always precisely pitched). Inner voices were sometimes cast into sharp relief (plenty of harp), lending the argument a skeletal transparency. Elsewhere, cataclysmic complexity was reduced to a kind of hollow, Lilliputian gabble.
The conventional sense of the music was more convincingly projected in the inner movements. The unpredictable Ländler fared best, its rural-sounding winds eminently credible, ruder inflections and all. The Rondo Burleske was precipitate—scarcely clean, linear, or Hindemithian, but unarguably spirited. The disappointment was the finale. Here, the band’s gut strings turned seedy and pallid, the vibrato so curtailed that the melody line regularly cried out for a bigger sonority. The would-be expressive portamenti ultimately felt ‘painted on’. That said, the fragile, airy quality of the final disintegration struck home in a genuinely new way.
Prevented from attending the concert in person by a bout of COVID, I am unable to report on the orchestra’s seating plan, how well its supposedly ‘astounding revelations’ (Tom Service) carried in the hall, or the precise nature of the incident that delayed the start. BBC Radio 3’s sound engineers communicated a balanced, if unimposing, only sometimes wispy sonority—not excluding the customary beaker-dropping noises off. Towards the end, the capacity crowd seemed increasingly rapt and attentive until someone broke the silence, possibly an Italian tourist determined to be the first to signal their appreciation. Claudio Abbado, an avatar of lighter-textured Mahler and a mentor to the present conductor, possessed the indefinable authority to pre-empt such disruptions. This is not the only thing we would appear to have lost.