Bushra El-Turk
Mosaic
Haydn
Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor, ‘Farewell’
Mahler
Das Lied von der Erde
Jamie Barton (mezzo-soprano) & Clay Hilley (tenor)
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Anja Bihlmaier
Reviewed by: Curtis Rogers
Reviewed: 21 August, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
Two leave-takings here, one famously a joke at the end of one of Haydn’s middle period Sturm und Drang symphonies as a witty reminder to his employer in remote Eszterháza that he and his fellow musicians were due their holiday; the other a farewell to life that constitutes the last movement (as long as Haydn’s four together) of Mahler’s symphonic song cycle.
Anja Bihlmaier led the BBC Philharmonic in a rather well-mannered account of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, its jagged edges and unsettled harmonies smoothed out somewhat by the richer sonority of modern instruments tempered by such HIP practices as a lack of vibrato and rubato, and generally brisk but not excessively fast tempi. Pounding rhythms from cellos and doubles basses to the conductor’s right gave dramatic impetus in the first movement and a jaunty accompaniment to the too-fast Adagio, with flicked grace notes from the violins, though that momentum didn’t prevent the movement from meandering later. A stylish one-to-a-bar Menuetto led to a playful Presto finale, giving way to a lilting major-key conclusion (again not an Adagio here) as the players strayed off the stage one by one – even Bihlmaier herself, leaving just a trio of performers, and finally the last two violins alone, their music drifting off into reposeful silence.
Despite blazing, even unruly horns to announce the boisterous ‘Drinking Song of the Earth’s Misery’ which opens Das Lied von der Erde, this interpretation was a casual one, not really establishing a sustained earnest mood overall, but committed more to localised, passing instrumental effects following those horns, such as fluttering strings and woodwind in ‘Of Beauty’, and shrieking clarinets and trumpets later in that section. In the often excitable and high-lying tenor part Clay Hilley remained lyrical and unstrained but he was submerged by the orchestra rather than leading them in the drink-fuelled reveals his songs encourage.
It took Jamie Barton the first two lines of her first song ‘The Lonely One in Autumn’ to find her vocal feet, and even after that her performance was chopped about, not settling into one musical or poetical voice – sometimes lustrous with vibrato, sometimes reaching a witchy depth, and various registers in between. She evinced a more sustained lyrical ardour or yearning in the long concluding ‘Farewell’, but the rather matter-of-fact approach by Bihlmaier worked against that in being able to take full effect. For me, something was missing, preventing a complete impression of resignation or sublimation.
To open the concert was Bushra El-Turk’s Mosaic (2009) apparently inspired by ‘the sense of otherness and rootlessness that Mahler found in ancient Chinese poetry’ that he set (in translation) in Das Lied. That otherness was conveyed here by the BBC PO’s quietly manic background of buzzing, tremolo strings, over which came more vivid snatches of melody, first on the oboe, then on stopped brass, and the horn. From that emerged a distant, strange sounding Byzantine chant with Eastern melodic inflections, as enigmatic and unsure of its identity as at the beginning.