Nézet-Séguin Conducts Mahler (1st review)

No one would think that necessary today, when most conductors regard a Mahler cycle as a critical career yardstick. But in 1945, Mahler was a largely ignored figure. This is striking when you think that the three most prominent musical figures in the first decade of the 20th century were probably Mahler, Sibelius, and Strauss. The latter two never fell out of public favor, but getting a Mahler symphony performed at all in the 1940s was a daunting task.

Why? For several reasons. Mahler came at the beginning of a reaction against the long, late Romantic symphony, and his premature death in 1911 seemed to put paid to it. Stravinsky — he who famously remarked that music was incapable of conveying emotion, Romantic or otherwise — was then the composer in fashion.

The Second Viennese School reacted in its own way, concentrating on small ensembles and brief, fragmentary expression. With Hitler’s rise, Mahler was banned altogether, along with other Jewish composers on most of the European continent.

Bernstein’s fresh voice

Nonetheless, Mahler was still in circulation to a degree. The young Dmitri Shostakovich discovered him, and his influence was immediately felt in Shostakovich’s own Fourth Symphony. It was just Mahler’s luck, however — not to mention Shostakovich’s — that the score fell afoul of Joseph Stalin’s musical tastes and went unperformed for 25 years.

By the 1940s, then, Walter — a close friend of Mahler’s, and like him Jewish — was in many ways his lone champion. All that changed in the 1960s, when yet another Jewish musician, Leonard Bernstein, found in Mahler a master and a kindred spirit.

The rediscovery of Mahler may be the most significant musical event of the past 50 years in the concert hall, and it may be Bernstein’s own most significant legacy as well. Lenny didn’t just find a neglected composer and give him a hearing. His performances and recordings infused Mahler with a quirky, quintessentially American energy that endowed him with a fresh voice.

Walter forgotten

Now it’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s turn to take on Mahler. In his post-concert discussion, Nézet-Séguin remarked that his own introduction to Mahler had come through a recording by Gilbert Kaplan, an amateur particularly fascinated by Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. One could wince a bit at that, but Nézet-Séguin quickly added that Bernstein had shaped his conception of Mahler and that the Bernstein recordings were still in his view in a class by themselves.

Yannick never mentioned Walter, whom Bernstein revered and whose indisposition before a New York Philharmonic concert in 1943 gave the young Bernstein the opportunity that made him famous. Bernstein would also have heard a rare performance of the Resurrection Symphony that year by Artur Rodziński, and…of such happenstance is history often made.

At any rate, the Walter recordings are still superb. I suggest that Yannick check them out.

Conversion to Christianity

The Resurrection is of course no stranger to the Philadelphia Orchestra by now. Last February, it performed an early version of the first movement, the tone poem Todtenfeier. Mahler began the symphony in 1888, shortly after completing his First Symphony, but he didn’t finish it until 1894. The problem lay in his dramatic conception of the work.

It begins with a funeral lament, which was originally associated in Mahler’s mind with the programmatic hero of his First Symphony, The Titan. But after one buries the hero, what then? As long as the lament was conceived as an appendage to the First Symphony, there seemed nowhere further to go. But gradually Mahler saw his theme as resurrection.

Was this perception tied in to the Christianity he would formally embrace in 1897? We may say both yes and no — yes, insofar as the idea of resurrection is most potently embodied in Western culture in the figure of Jesus, but no in terms of a literal acceptance of Christian dogma. Mahler was no Bruckner. His religious quest was rooted in doubt, not faith.

Heart condition

Mahler’s resolution of his compositional impasse was the five-movement arch form that also became the basis of his Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth symphonies. (The First Symphony was originally a five-movement work as well, but Mahler later dropped one of the movements.) This arch form consisted of two large outer movements bracketing three smaller ones: two movements usually of a scherzo, or dance character, and one slow movement. In the context of the Resurrection Symphony, these inner movements were a kind of purgatorial reflection leading slowly toward the light — “Primal Light” (Urlicht) is the actual title of the Resurrection’s fourth movement as well as of the text sung in it. The finale thus provides an apotheosis in which spiritual union with God is descried if not attained.

As Mahler’s own mortality approached — the Ninth and the unfinished Tenth symphonies were composed in the shadow of the fatal heart condition that cut him short at 50 — the finales of these arch-form symphonies embodied not hope but anguished resignation. But in 1894, the still-young Mahler was able to end with affirmation.

Between nuance and tact

Programs and such were crutches that helped the composer along; the music is what remains. Nézet-Séguin began with clipped phrases that suggested he would offer a revisionist Mahler, tightly rhythmic and detailed. But these initial gestures soon alternated with held notes that pointed in the opposite direction— a confusion also marked by some uncharacteristically sour notes in the winds and brass.

Things happily improved in the succeeding Andante moderato, where Nézet-Séguin handled the transition from the movement’s middle section with particular finesse. Thereafter, his interpretation emphasized the lyrical qualities of the score, abetted by the sensitive if not overly robust singing of soprano Angela Meade and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, and the fine choral work of the Westminster Symphonic Choir under Joe Miller. The offstage musicians hit their marks perfectly, too. We know that Nézet-Séguin can whip up an orchestra, but, once he hit his stride, he offered nuance and something like tact. The line between the grand and the grandiose can be a little difficult in Mahler, but Nézet-Séguin negotiated it well. In music that has become as familiar as this, less is sometimes more.

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.

To read another review by Victor L. Schermer, click here.