Prom 62, review: Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Phil take Mahler to Seventh heaven

Nothing packs out a Prom so well as a legendary orchestra playing a big beast of the symphonic repertoire - as was proved by Saturday night’s appearance of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Adding to the allure was the presence of Kirill Petrenko, the orchestra’s artistic director since Simon Rattle’s departure, and a man wrapped in Greta Garbo-like reclusiveness. His air of rapt seclusion in the music-making gave the concert an extra frisson of intensity.

Petrenko’s extraordinary gifts for shaping a musical narrative were needed, because the single work on the programme was Mahler’s most puzzling symphony, the Seventh. Several very eminent conductors have told me they’re baffled by this strange journey from funeral march to drunken joy, with detours to night terrors and Italian-serenade charm along the way.

It would be misleading to say that Petrenko made sense of it all. What he did clarify with uncanny precision was the music’s yawning fissures and sudden switchbacks, its sudden reaches for the sublime next to raucous, street-parade banality. Plus its sheer complexity. Most music sorts itself naturally into foreground and background, but in Mahler’s symphony it’s as if everything in the writhing orchestral sound wants to be foreground at once, an effect Petrenko stage-managed brilliantly to make it graspable. He would gesture imperiously at the clarinets, mimicking with his whole body their café-orchestra jauntiness, before spinning round on one heel to coax a hard, throaty rattle from the violas, like a bad dream obtruding on a sunny day.

As well as bringing out the music’s weird Freudian shadowiness, Petrenko gave a special emotional flavour to moments that could seem ordinary, such as the big romantic melody in the first movement. This can often sound like a feeble echo of a similar melody in the Sixth symphony, but the way it emerged from timidity to ecstasy under Petrenko’s hands made it seem like gold.

As for the orchestra itself I could write pages on the tangy, insightful playing of many individual players, and the miraculous unanimity of the whole. There was tenor horn player Christhard Gössling, who filled the Albert Hall with a massive sepulchral hollowness in his funeral-march solo at the beginning. There were the wailing oboes in the flying-ghosts third movement, in dialogue with the wheeling, swooping violins, sounding like a whole troupe of witches. Alongside these dark oil-colours were numerous passages of water-colour delicacy, like the tiptoe ending of the Second Nocturne. Finally there came the massive uproariousness of the final movement, a huge emotional release which drove the audience wild.