Rather than pursue the Tudor connection, McMaster suggested Rambert should focus on the music of Mahler. He knew that in the company’s repertoire was Five Ruckert Songs, choreographed by Scottish Ballet founder Peter Darrell and set to Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder. With the addition of Songs of a Wayfarer, a new piece by Kim Brandstrup set to Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, the company would have a triple bill entirely based on Mahler song cycles.
“We thought why not do the whole emotional wring-your-audience-out thing?” says McMaster, 60. “It’s a one-off festival idea.”
Such thematic programming is something it takes a festival to do, but the ambition of the project didn’t end there. McMaster has teamed Rambert with the full force of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, complete with mezzo soprano Jane Irwin and baritone Gerald Finley. Audiences going into the Edinburgh Playhouse this week will be split between dance fans eager to see Rambert’s first festival appearance in 21 years and music aficionados keen to indulge in a whole evening of Mahler.
“This is a special event,” says Mark Baldwin, Rambert’s artistic director. “It’s the only time you’ll ever see these three pieces together. The effect should be absolutely unforgettable.”
“It’s very exciting,” agrees conductor Paul Hoskins, the company’s music director since 1996. “It’s not something that you’d ever see or hear anywhere else. I’m not aware of anyone ever playing three Mahler song cycles in one programme.”
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For Baldwin, the project fulfils his brief to ensure live music is a central part of the Rambert experience. “To see Rambert with a big orchestra has always been a fantasy of mine,” says the Fiji-born ex-dancer who has led the company since 2002. “This programme gives out the message that I’m really interested in music. People will see that we’re not going to turn up with a tape and that someone hasn’t just gone through a pile of CDs and said, ‘Oh, we’ll choreograph to that because I like side two, track one.’”
Mahler’s music will be played chronologically over the evening, beginning with Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, a four-movement cycle published in 1884, and progressing through Ruckert Leider, dating from 1901, and finishing with the heart-rending Kindertotenlieder from 1902. The dance, meanwhile, traces the opposite path, kicking off with the world premiere of Kim Brandstrup’s Songs of a Wayfarer, going back to 1978 for the late Peter Darrell’s Five Ruckert Songs, and finishing with Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies from 1937.
“We have a classic from 1937 that still works today, something that was made in the 1970s that people will find very strong and moving still, and something new,” says Baldwin. “The three choreographers approach it differently, but what they have in common is a respect for the music. The structure of the music is inherent in the choreography.”
Anyone who has seen the company on its regular trips to Scotland will know that triple bills are its speciality. But where usually Baldwin would bring together three contrasting pieces, here the dark, intimate scores are much more unified.
“The music is contained and restrained,” says Hoskins. “It’s like looking on something private from a distance and having it explained for you. I want to invite the audience into it, rather than throwing it at you. The main thing for us is to sustain this extraordinarily beautiful and often quite slow and quiet music. Although it’s a large orchestra, for large spaces of time only a few people are playing.”
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Although Mahler is now a staple part of the classical canon, his success has been largely posthumous. In his day, he was better known as a conductor, albeit one with a fierce disregard for tradition. This, argues Hoskins, is what makes his music such an excellent counterpoint to the choreography. “Mahler was an extremely theatrical musician,” he says. “He emphasised the engagement of the audience with the drama of the music. He was not an ivory tower musician, it was about the emotional experience. In that respect, it’s wonderful to focus on Mahler in a theatrical context, which he could never have dreamt of.”
From a musical point of view, Hoskins is convinced Mahler has maintained his radical edge. “There are still things that make you gasp; things that nobody has done since and certainly nobody had done before,” he says.
“While his music looks back — he conducted Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and his influences are quite easy to spot — there’s also a way that he uses instruments in solo lines, in odd combinations and odd registers that looks forward to the 20th century. There’s a place in Kindertotenlieder where the first bassoon is incredibly high, which gives this lonely, alienated sound to a song about grieving the death of a child. It was written several years before the very famous high bassoon solo that started Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Everyone says that changed music for ever, but Mahler was doing it ten years before (Stravinsky).”
Baldwin sees himself as the inheritor of a tradition, established by Sergei Diaghilev and passed on via Dame Marie Rambert, to introduce artists of all disciplines to each other and to encourage them to come up with something new. A company schooled in both classical and modern idioms, Rambert uses the past to move the artform forward, which is why a Brandstrup can sit comfortably alongside a Tudor and why it’s no contradiction for the company’s next project with Aberdeen ’s enfant terrible Michael Clark.
“You need incredible amounts of discipline to be in Rambert,” says Baldwin. “That’s what we bring to this Mahler music. Because of that discipline, it builds up its own emotions. Dancers don’t have to pull faces to move the audience; they move the audience because there’s an incredible respect for the music.”
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Mahler and Dance, Edinburgh Playhouse, Sep 2-4