released January 2, 2023

It’s a strange phenomenon that great Strauss conductors rarely make great Mahler conductors. There are exceptions of course, such as Lorin Maazel and David Zinman, but, on the whole, those who identify closely with Mahler seldom identify equally closely with Strauss. So where does Sir John Pritchard fit into this paradox, and how did such a peerless interpreter of Strauss’s stage and symphonic works come to perform Mahler’s Second Symphony so marvellously? True, Sir John, or J.P., as he was affectionately known by his friends and colleagues, could conjure up Strauss’s lyricism and grandeur with consummate easy, and, yes, it was equally true that he was an optimist who was totally in tune with the composer’s Weltanschauung. But, unlike the atheist Strauss, J.P. also had a latent religiosity and deep-rooted sense of superstition that often coloured his approach to life. And perhaps it was for these very reasons that he was able to delve so deeply into the underlying social and religious content of Mahler’s 1894 masterpiece.

Between 1978 and 1989, I had the great honour of acting as Sir John’s personal musical assistant and quickly came to realise how thoughtful and perceptive he was as an artist. Shortly after we got to know each other in Cologne, I went record shopping with him and bought Sir John Barbirolli’s commercial discs of Mahler’s Sixth and Ninth Symphonies. When we returned to John’s flat in Rodenkirchen, he immediately put them on the turntable and was instantly bowled over by what he heard. Clearly moved, he then said, ‘I think that they would suit me rather well, too, don’t you?’ I barely knew him at the time, but, even then, I didn’t think that those symphonies were right for him. He wasn’t a nihilist by nature, and he certainly wasn’t someone who easily identified with the darker side of the human psyche. This became obvious when he later performed the second of the two symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at a provincial concert during the mid-1980s. He found the
experience less than satisfying and never conducted the work again.

But neither he nor I had any such reservations after he gave Mahler’s Fourth and First Symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the 1980 and 1985 Proms respectively. His reading of the Fourth Symphony, with Jessye Norman as soloist in the last movement, captured perfectly the work’s religious naïveté, and his interpretation of the First Symphony, which included the now-rarely-heard ‘Blumine’ movement, was a remarkable exploration of Mahler’s youthful compositional aesthetic. And then there was John’s deeply moving performance of the composer’s transcendental Second Symphony heard here, which he gave with the same orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on 16 February 1986.

As J.P.’s associate conductor that night, it was my job to take charge of the off-stage bands in the last movement. From my position behind the scenes, where I was perched with headphones on and score in hand, it was clear from the outset that this was a very special performance indeed. The near-unbearable tension that John generated in the funereal first movement, the rusticity and directness that he captured in the second and third movements, and the lyrical solemnity that he conjured up in the fourth movement left his Festival Hall audience in no doubt that they were hearing something quite remarkable that evening. But it was J.P.’s reading of the symphony’s gigantic last movement that left the public and the critics reaching for superlatives. Stephen Pettitt of The Times was one such critic, and he summed up the performance best when he wrote on 18 February: ‘And then came that wondrous finale, in which Miss [Felicity] Palmer, Felicity Lott and the two splendid choirs really did transport us to other worlds, aided by orchestral playing of impressive warmth and nobility. The brass section never faltered; the woodwind and strings were nearly as perfect; and Sir John was masterful in his expansive treatment of this glorious music’.

Professor Raymond Holden AM
Emeritus Professor of Music
Royal Academy of Music, London