San Francisco Symphony plays Mahler's Second (1st review)

Beethoven's nine symphonies redefined the symphonic form as a spiritual quest whose object was not God but the self. That was a daunting challenge for the 19th Century that no one until Mahler took up.

You might look at the Bruckner Nine in these terms, but Bruckner himself, devout Catholic that he was, would have been scandalized by the thought. Wagner's Ring cycle was clearly a quest-drama, but one cast in tragic terms, with the Romantic hero no longer an affirmative figure but doomed to the noble defeat of the love-death. Strauss's early tone poems clearly reflect the heroic project, but viewed through the prism of irony: the hero grown a bit fat and ridiculous, and destined only for a fireside pipe.

Mahler too is an ironist, but still the heroic striver for all that. This makes him a throwback of sorts. Of course he carries the baggage of the post-Wagnerian hero, but irony is only an additional layer of complication that flags him on.

Some of Mahler's symphonies win through to victory, some end in extinction at the hands of an overwhelming Fate. The journey itself is the end, the self-apotheosis. Whether it ends in victory or defeat is immaterial: The hero has lived. Immortality can only crown that fact; oblivion cannot erase it.

Harking back to Beethoven

Michael Tilson Thomas brought the Mahler Second to the Kimmel Center in his first visit in six years with the San Francisco Symphony. With its huge scope and its choral finale, the Second clearly harks back to the Beethoven Ninth.

At the same time, however, it is curiously joined at the hip to Mahler's First Symphony, which is as it were the hero's debut. The final pages of the First go out in a blaze of what may be glory, but is perhaps better read as a flameout instead. Mahler followed it up with a tone poem entitled Todtenfeuer ("Funeral Rites"), which suggests the latter interpretation, and this work, moderately revised, wound up as the first movement of the Second Symphony.

Mahler didn't give the Second its still-current subtitle, "The Resurrection," but the recycling of the tone poem suggests that he may have seen his first two symphonies, for all their differences, as a dyadic unit in which the buried hero breaks the bonds of death, rather like the year-god of ancient mythology reasserting his claim on life.

Like Wagner in a concert hall

However one wishes to construe this, the Second certainly stands on its own. The First Symphony really was a pathbreaking event, with its fleering dissonances and its quite new harmonic language; but the Second is an altogether more monumental work, breaking the bonds not only of sonic but physical convention with its offstage brass and stereophonic effects, as if the composer were trying to bring the wrap-around experience of the Wagnerian stage into the concert hall.

Tilson Thomas had the proceedings under firm control. He took the opening movements at a fairly brisk clip, in no way short-changing them but holding his forces in reserve for the final three linked movements.

As with Vladimir Jurowski's recent performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Tilson Thomas had his own ideas about string arrangements, setting the cellos and basses to the left of the stage and bringing their darker figuration to the fore. Balances were excellent and details pristine, an impressive feat indeed in the murky acoustics of Verizon Hall. There was plenty of heft to the climaxes, but the pianissimos and diminuendos were particularly ravishing. This was a well-drilled ensemble on its best mettle.

Soprano Laura Claycomb and mezzo-soprano Katarina Karneus did not have the biggest of voices, but they sang clearly and feelingly. The Westminster Choir, prepared by Joe Miller, was its usual excellent self.

Unique podium style

Tilson Thomas has his own podium style. He stands with feet planted firmly together, swiveling from the hips to turn now this way and now that. Twice his gestures swept him clear around to face the audience, as if he were conducting it too. He certainly brought it with him, with one of the most sustained and enthusiastic ovations heard in recent years.

It was well earned. Tilson Thomas is a musician's musician, and what he showed in Mahler was not merely the passion and energy, but the superlative craft of the score.♦


To read another commentary by Steve Cohen, click here.