SYMPHONY CONCERT. On 22 November, 2025. At The Cape Town City Hall. CELEBRATING BERNHARD GUELLER. Mahler: Symphony No 5 in C Sharp minor. DEON IRISH reviews.
This concert marked the appointment of Bernhard Gueller as Conductor Laureate for Life of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, after an association with the orchestra (and its predecessor) of slightly over thirty years, having served as Principal Guest Conductor since 2016.
In these circumstances, it seems appropriate not merely to review the concert, but to indulge in something of a retrospect of Gueller’s association with Cape Town orchestras.
To do so, I have gone through the more than 100 reviews I have written of his performances with, first, the CTSO and then the CTPO and, finally. the present CPO. I believe his first Cape Town appearance to have been in 1994; but the earliest review of which I have a copy was of a National Youth Orchestra concert he conducted on a Saturday night in June, 1995 in the City Hall, and which featured the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, a very stern test of a conductor’s pedagogical skills with an entirely student orchestra.
But – and this is perhaps significant – it certainly wasn’t a small orchestra; I noted that the 16.14.8.10.6 string disposition “produced an electrifying effect, the whole bow chords reminding one how uniquely powerful this most basic of orchestral sounds in fact is”.
Splendid sonorities of the Mahler symphony
Fast forward to this last Saturday night in the City Hall with a pretty comparably-sized orchestra and the sheer delight of hearing the splendid sonorities of this Mahler symphony in all the richness of its orchestration – more particularly the powerful writing for lower strings.
(Somewhat surprisingly, the second oldest review I have of Gueller was a CTSO concert in the City Hall in late 1995, in which the programme also featured the Symphonie Fantastique, and also with an expanded orchestra including fifty-three string players.)
Following the demise of the CTSO in March 1997, Gueller became the Principal Guest Conductor of the new CTPO, which gave almost all of its concerts in the Opera House, playing with an acoustic shell up on the stage.
The CTPO period was in general not a happy time for concert-goers, since the Opera House acoustic is ungrateful for orchestral playing and not a few potentially memorable concerts (with soloists as distinguished as Nina Beilina, Emma Johnson and Shlomo Mintz) came to grief on the rocks of an unflattering acoustic. So, ultimately, did the orchestra.
They were desperate times for orchestral musicians in Cape Town and Gueller was amongst those who tried to keep things alive with a player-managed, revived CTSO. He conducted the first concert of this new venture on 17 August 2000, happily back in the City Hall.
Whilst the restoration of orchestral music to the City following the bankruptcy of the CTPO gave rise to hope, the inaugural concert itself proved something of a disparate mish-mash, the frankly weird programme even including the theme song from “Titanic” (which, given the recent demise of the orchestra’s predecessor, seemed particularly inappropriate). It seems likely that it was not Gueller’s choice.
(There was, however, one extraordinary concert at – of all places – Ratanga Junction, in the year 2000, celebrating the millennium with a raft of planetary and space music which, with very good electronic enhancement, worked extraordinarily well.)
However, through the collective efforts of many music lovers and some notable benefactors, the new Cape Philharmonic Orchestra was founded and, in the years since then, we have had the pleasure of watching Gueller in action, and hearing the results, in countless dozens of concerts including some really memorable collaborations with outstanding soloists: one recalls, in particular, a Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Mikhail Ovrutsky; the Elgar Violin Concerto played by Daniel Rowland; the Brahms B flat Piano Concerto with Antonio Pompa-Baldi; a Rachmaninov 3rd Piano Concerto with Lukas Vondracek and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto played by Torleif Thedéen.
He has also conducted several concerts marking special events; none, perhaps, more significant than the stupendous concert that marked the re-opening of the City Hall after its major restoration, on 14 August, 2018. I’m pretty certain that it was he that chose Mahler’s glorious C minor Symphony, the aptly-named “Resurrection”, for that celebration.
An dictionary of composers and their works
Gueller’s programmes have in general been composed of relatively mainstream repertoire. He has conducted a great deal of Brahms and Tchaikovsky and not a little Shostakovich, although the Romantic repertoire has dominated, with Gueller displaying an understandable affinity for Mendelssohn and Schumann, Dvorak, Bruckner and his beloved Mahler. French repertoire has been mainly represented with works by Franck, Saint-Saëns and Berlioz; and, the Russian school has also featured quite a lot of both Prokofiev and Rachmaninov.
But along with these have been performances of an absolute dictionary of composers and their works and it is fair to say that Gueller has entertained us with truly extensive repertoire, even if not necessarily wide-ranging in terms of idiom or school.
Which is not to say that he avoids the obscure or the more modern; indeed we have probably heard more of the latter from him than we have Mozart or Haydn, with fine performances of the likes of Ives, Copland, Poulenc, Britten, Gershwin and Bernstein. He has conducted many works by South African composers, including the first performances of two important pieces by Peter Klatzow: “Outer Sounds and Inner Echoes” (a tone-poem which deserves revival) and the lovely “Three paintings by Irma Stern” (which, given the controversy surrounding the closure of the eponymous library, might also be due another hearing).
It was in response to all of this considerable accomplishment in Cape Town (without even considering his work in Europe or Canada), that we all came to the City Hall on Saturday last to pay tribute to Bernhard Gueller and to hear him conduct a work that is particularly meaningful to him.
And we once again luxuriated in an orchestra of 86 players on stage, ready to tackle the considerable physical feat of playing this 75 minute symphony. Even more strenuous a task for a conductor, particularly one who in recent weeks had suffered an episode of serious ill-health.
Thompson delivered a not-quite arresting opening fanfare of the symphony: the celebrated C sharp minor arpeggio theme for solo trumpet, its rhythm an obvious reference to Beethoven’s fifth symphony – certainly no mere coincidence.
Steinberg argues – convincingly, I think – that this symphony marks a turn away from Mahler’s previous four, which were all heavily reliant on song and text and vocal components, to a purely instrumental and abstract symphonic conception that had been perfected in the quoted symphony. Is the opening funeral march then perhaps to be seen as one commemorating Beethoven, himself?
Gueller certainly created of it an episode of baleful loss: shuddering strings, bleak brass and muffled percussion undoubtedly portraying the loss of something significant, whether a life, a Culture or even an Age. Gueller nurtured the brass into a moody rhythmic drive, matched with something approaching resentment in the anguished string lines.
The movement was beautifully shaped, Gueller making the wonderful variant of the second subject assigned to trios of flutes and then clarinets, and the succeeding wraithlike statement of the opening fanfare rhythm on just muted timpani, its emotional fulcrum. One can barely think of another composer who would have dared such an effect!
Thus far, orchestral playing had been entirely worthy of the occasion, particularly bearing in mind that there were a number of extra players for this concert (by which I do not imply any inferior ability, but rather that it always takes an extra player a little while to achieve the almost instinctive responses of regular members to a conductor’s indications).
The following, “Stürmisch” movement (actually the second part of the first section) was given an electrifying reading, Gueller plunging the orchestra into a white-water gorge of clashing harmonies, tempi and instrumentation. I have always found it a somewhat difficult section to characterize in the context of the rest of the work – his indication of “Stormily, with the greatest vehemance” seems to hint at something more than the musically abstract, but what?
Gueller followed his own muse and made of the movement a questioning debate, resolving ultimately in a passage of magisterial brass declamation and a subsequent gentle resolution of the dispute and serene acceptance. It worked.
Then the huge third movement – a Scherzo which assumes close to the proportions of a concerto – or at least concertante – for horn. This is yet another of those sardonic essays on the Waltz (or, perhaps, Ländler) to which Mahler returned repeatedly. Rather in the manner some composers choose the major rather than the minor mode to demonstrate real grief, so Mahler seems at time determined to show that the seemingly innocent, or cheerful, or simple, or elegant 3/4 signature is, in contrast, entirely capable of being complex and disturbing as any other rhythmic structure.
A quixotic expedition
Gueller gave this movement full centrality in his reading and – duly aided by Shannon Thebus (splendid in the taxing horn solos) – the result was a quixotic expedition through varying moods and polyphonic textures – the highpoint being Gueller’s quite lovely handling of the skeletal pizzicato waltz episode (very Twin Peaks) in the latter half of the movement.
Mahler had been studying Bach and that influence is apparent in the quite deliberate and rather mannered employment of polyphonic elements – particularly fugato – throughout the movement. Strings had a field day demonstrating imitative entries and the trio of clarinets, in particular shone. The final outburst, with urgent timpani and a Don Juan-like final horn outburst, was truly arresting.
Then the Adagietto, undoubtedly the best known section of the symphony and not infrequently performed as a stand-alone movement. If one saw the film, Death in Venice, it’s hard not to associate this elegy with that narrative. But one has to resist that urge, somehow, and find a far less sensational reason for the undeniably sensual “Sehr langsam” indication. Commentators have suggested it was a case of “Mahler in Love”. If so, the setting was certainly not Venice, but rather a warm summer’s evening in Styria, at Mahler’s house at Maiernigg, on the banks of Lake Wörth.
That might explain why many of the earlier performances – by the likes of Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg are actually quicker than is nowadays generally the case, a performance practice that Steinberg, once again, attributes to Bernstein’s very slow account at the funeral of John F. Kennedy.
(This is analogous to the fate of Elgar’s “Nimrod”: conceived as a depiction of a comfortable and thoughtful conversation between two old friends in a garden on a summer evening, it has become – inaccurately, although not inappropriately – a prime conveyor of funereal sorrow.)
Gueller’s tempo was certainly slow, but not irremediably so; and he avoided the trap of making the rubati so extreme as to destroy the forward propulsion of the string lines. But I’m afraid – as seems always to be the case – it was at this quiet point that a side door in the gallery to my left banged in the wind. Someone got up to secure it. That didn’t work and it banged again. Another person went to assist. So much for the summer’s evening.
(Actually, it did remind one of a concert also conducted by Gueller in 2002, in which he conducted the “Eroica” to the accompaniment of concrete being poured at the next door Woolworths’ building site!)
The horn announced the opening of the finale and Gueller led the orchestra into a generally merry account of its chirpy rondo theme, the orchestra scampering along with delighted alacrity. They had been well prepared, a performance of this work was something of a treat for them, and the occasion made it all the more special. The finale was relentlessly vibrant, with the entire brass section coming into their own with a truly magnificent account of the final chorale.
The performance received a lengthy standing ovation, both conductor and orchestra members fully deserving such. I saw Gueller at the reception afterwards. He looked exhausted, like a man who has given it his all. As he had, and always has.
What: Celebrating Berhard Gueller
Reviewer: Deon Irish
WS
