The Mahler Experiment review – physical drama comes at a musical cost in choreographed symphony

Sinfonia Smith Square, London
Tom Morris’s staged take on Mahler’s first symphony is valiantly performed by Stephanie Childress and Sinfonia Smith Square, but the result feels more like R&D than a finished product

If you’re Macbeth, a moving forest generally isn’t a good thing. But what if you’re Mahler? The instrumentalists of Sinfonia Smith Square, conductor, Stephanie Childress and director, Tom Morris decided to test the result in The Mahler Experiment. As Morris declared cheerfully at the outset: “None of us quite know what’s going to happen!”

The composer’s First Symphony conjures a shifting landscape of bird calls and blooming flowers, town bands and hunting parties, spring’s rebirth and man’s death and funeral procession. You can see the temptation to turn a sonic journey into a physical one, especially when you’re working with a space as flexible as Smith Square Hall.