Spellbinding: Herbert Blomstedt’s Mahler 9 reviewed

Ivor Cutler called silence the music of the cognoscenti. But there’s silence and there’s silence, and a regular concertgoer hears a fair bit of both. The ability to fold silence into a musical line – to create the impression that a conductor is somehow sculpting a sound which doesn’t exist – is an indicator of high artistry on the podium.

Conversely, there’s the embarrassing strained silence when, at the end of a work, a conductor decides to keep the baton raised and see how long he can hold back the tide of applause. It’s spray-on sublimity; an attempt to force the illusion of shared transcendence. It’s the musical version of faking an orgasm.

The silence in the Royal Festival Hall at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was of a different order. The conductor, Herbert Blomstedt, wasn’t grandstanding.