ARTS DIARY: MUSIC RLPO/Schwarz, Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool.

Byline: WILLIAM LEECE

AFTER five years, it's time to say goodbye.

Gossip from within the Philharmonic may have suggested that the relationship between some of the orchestra and Gerard Schwarz was sometimes a bit bumpy, but everyone is nothing if not professional and the partnership has certainly delivered value for money with audiences.

Schwarz's five-year tenure at the musical helm of the Liverpool Philharmonic ends this week with a pair of suitably valedictory concerts.

First up on Saturday was Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

It has an elegiac, farewell-to-life feeling to it, although the ailing Mahler was able to complete the bulk of a tenth symphony before his death.

Despite his American birth, Schwarz is, in fact, closely linked to the central European tradition of recent Philharmonic conductors by virtue of his Viennese parents.

Indeed, his background is such that one would expect him to have Mahler's music at the very core of his soul.

Maybe the critical jury was out for much of the first movement, despite having been laid out by Schwarz with enviable clarity of texture and purpose.

But the music really caught fire at the beginning of the second movement, with its combination of Austrian folksiness and Mahlerian irony and bite.

From that moment onwards, the symphony never looked back, and the spell lasted long enough and with such intensity that Schwarz was able to delay the applause for several seconds after the last pianissimo had faded away.

To borrow the football clichA, this was very much a concert of two halves, and preceding the Mahler was a selection of five motets by Anton Bruckner, conducted not by Schwarz but by the Philharmonic's choirmaster, Ian Tracey.

Maybe Mahler's ninth gets a Philharmonic outing every five years or so.

But I doubt if Bruckner's motets have been heard in the last 50 years, if ever.

Forget the Bruckner of the sprawling symphonies sometimes dismissed as musical boa constrictors.

Bruckner's sacred choral works are finely-crafted little gems, living in a sound world half way between Palestrina and Wagner.

This selection played on Saturday covered the entirety of Bruckner's composing career, from his studying days to the mid-1880s, the time of his enduring choral masterpiece, the Te Deum.

Every one was as new to me as they were, I suspect, to the overwhelming majority of Saturday's audience.

If I had to take one home, it would have been the Os Justi, reinventing ancient musical modes for contemplation of the 19th century.

The mostly unaccompanied Philharmonic Choir, as unfamiliar with the music as everyone else, sang the motets as if they had been at the core of their repertoire for years - a night to remember.