Symphony Review: An inspiring Mahler "Resurrection" from the SLSO

A good Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") should deliver the "three Ts": tragedy, terror, and triumph. The performance last Friday night (September 27, 2009) by Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) and Chorus did all that and more. It was a brilliant piece of work.

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

The SLSO assembles for the Mahler 2nd

The "Resurrection" Symphony has long been a favorite of mine, going back to my first encounter with the classic Otto Klemperer recording from the early 1960s. A kind of Mahler multivitamin, the "Resurrection" contains all the key elements of the Viennese master's work: moments of chamber-music delicacy alternating with massive orchestral outbursts; vulgar marches; lilting Ländler; a darkly comic scherzo; and passages of sublime beauty; and, of course, that overwhelming final movement. And yet, in the musical equivalent of alchemy, Mahler's sense of architecture somehow transmutes it all into a single, unified work that brilliantly encompasses the themes of death, rebirth, and transcendence.

I loved everything about this performance, with certain moments standing out as emblematic of Mr. Denève's masterful command of the work.

Tamara Mumford

A tone of dramatic urgency was set from the start. There was anxiety in the string tremolos, and the rising first theme in the lower strings crackled with energy and menace. Mr. Denève used Mahler's silences very effectively, giving the final massive statement of the "death march" theme overwhelming power. That theme builds to a massive, dissonant series of chords in the brasses that resolves in a massive orchestral crash. Friday night it felt like the crack of doom.

There were many other wonderful details to be heard, all attesting to Mr. Denève's deep understanding of this music, right down to the most polished details. The Ländler theme of the second movement radiated wistful charm and the later pizzicato repetition by the strings was sheer gossamer. The sharp tympani attack that opened the third movement was striking and the orchestral "death shriek" at the end of that movement was hair raising. A writer for the BBC Symphony once described this as "the whole orchestra blowing/hammering/playing the heck out of their instruments," which about sums it up.

And then there was the calming fourth movement, with mezzo soloist Tamara Mumford both acting and singing the role of the small child insisting on admission to heaven with impressive conviction. She was a last-minute substitute for an ailing Kelley O'Connor, but you wouldn't have known that from the quality of her work. Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks blended with her lovingly in the first verse.

Joélle Harvey

The big challenge, of course, is the fifth and final movement, which begins with apocalypse--including offstage horns and even a brass band--and ends with the massive celebration of rebirth. Mahler wrote his own lyrics for this section, and they take the Christian concept of resurrection and expand it to a pantheistic celebration of life renewed. "At the end of the Second Symphony," observes Mr. Denève in the program notes, "the god that offers the possibility to arise, to be immortal, is a god that does not judge."

That's a lot of baggage for one movement and it can feel episodic, but it all worked perfectly Friday night. Soprano Joélle Harvey sang the "O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube" ("O believe, my heart, believe") verses with feeling, and the chorus sang with irresistible clarity and force. That final, full volume statement by the chorus and orchestra of Mahler's belief in the redemptive power of love was a glorious thing to behold.

This was, in short, a "Resurrection" that grabbed me from the start and didn't let go until that ecstatic finale.

Best of all, the SLSO musicians were all at the top of their game. The principals in every section played their solo moments perfectly. I was especially taken with Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Ann Choomack on piccolo in their fifth movement "birdsong" solo, but everyone covered themselves with glory. The horns and brasses, in particular, have never sounded better. All things considered, I'd rank that "Resurrection" up there with my all-time favorite, the one Leonard Slatkin conducted with the SLSO back in 1983. It was recorded digitally for Teldec back then. It's out of print, but you can still find it on Amazon.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra season continues this Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm with a pair of Romantic blockbusters: Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Elgar's Symphony No. 1. Edo de Waart will be at the podium and Joyce Yang at the keyboard. Performances take place in Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Heaven, I'm in Heaven

This Friday and Saturday (September 27 and 28) Stéphane Denève leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Mahler's awe-inspiring Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection"). Running around eighty minutes, it's the only work on the program but, trust me, you won't feel short changed.

Contemporary characterture of Mahler
conducting his Symphony No. 1

According to musicologist Donald Mitchell, Mahler once told Sibelius that a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything." His "Resurrection" Symphony takes that "one stop beyond" to embrace not only the world but also what comes after the world has been left behind. Death, rebirth, transcendence--it's all here and delivered with that dramatic punch that characterizes Mahler's best work.

The "Resurrection" had a long gestation period. Mahler composed the grandly tragic first movement--which he titled Todtenfeier ("Funeral Rite")--in 1888, shortly after the completion of his popular Symphony No. 1. Indeed, as Richard Freed points out in program notes for the National Symphony Orchestra, the composer originally intended this movement as "a direct sequel to his First Symphony, representing the funeral of the hero celebrated as a young man in that just-completed work."

In 1889, during his tenure as director of the Budapest Opera, he began work on the sweetly nostalgic second movement, with its reflection of earthy joys left behind, but didn't manage to finish it until 1893, when he had relocated to Hamburg. There, he also wrote the witty scherzo that became the symphony's third movement. Based on Mahler's earlier setting of a poem from the collection of folk poetry "Das Knaben Wunderhorn" ("The Boy's Magic Horn") about St. Anthony trying to preach to fishes--who, like humans, listen politely and then and go on their merry way--it becomes a metaphor for the endless whirl of daily existence.

At the same time Mahler wrote another "Wunderhorn" song, "Urlicht" ("Primal Light") which would become the basis for the mysterious fourth movement. It represents, in Mahler's words, "the soul's striving and questioning attitude towards God and its own immortality."

The grand final movement, with its overwhelming depiction of the end of the world and the final spiritual rebirth of all things, didn't take shape until 1894 when Mahler attended the funeral of Hans von Bülow, the renowned pianist and conductor who was a major figure on the 19th-century German musical scene. At the funeral, the chorus began to intone the first words of Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock's "Resurrection Ode"):

Rise again, yes, you will rise again,
My dust, after brief rest!
Immortal life! Immortal life
Will He, who called you, grant you.

Soprano Joelle Hervey
Photo courtesy of the artist

As Mahler wrote in an 1897 letter to Arthur Seidl "It flashed on me like lightning, and everything became plain and clear in my mind! It was the flash that all creative artists wait for--"conceiving by the Holy Ghost!" He fleshed out Klopstock's original with lyrics of this own (see below) and the symphony was finally born.

First performed in Berlin in 1895 with the composer conducting, the work was the most popular of Mahler's symphonies during his lifetime and it was voted the fifth most popular symphony of all time by a worldwide poll of high-profile conductors conducted by the BBC Music Magazine in 2016.

Maestro Denève articulates the work's universal appeal quite well in this week's program notes. "Maybe the 'Resurrection' is the most global of Mahler's symphonies. It is beyond religion. He had lost his mother, his father, his sister. At the end of the Second Symphony, the god that offers the possibility to arise, to be immortal, is a god that does not judge.

It is about love. The way we will save ourselves is love."

If that sounds rather unlike the angry, hyper-judgmental religion of some believers these days, perhaps it's because Mahler's own faith has never been entirely clear. An Austrian Jew who converted to Catholicism out of professional expediency, Mahler has always, to my ears, shown a kind of joyous pantheism in his music that transcends the crabbed limitations of dogma. You hear it most prominently in his Symphony No. 3, but also in those lines that Mahler added to Klopstock's originals in the triumphal, ecstatic finale of the "Resurrection" (translation from the SLSO program):

O believe, my heart, believe:
Nothing will be lost to you!
Yours, yes, yours is what you longed for,
Yours what you loved,
What you fought for!

O believe:
You were not born in vain!
You have not lived in vain, nor suffered!

All that has come into being must perish!
All that has perished must rise again!
Cease from trembling!
Prepare to live!

O Pain, piercer of all things!
From you I have been wrested!
O Death, conqueror of all things!
Now you are conquered!

With wings I won for myself,
In love's ardent struggle,
I shall soar upwards
To that light which no eye has penetrated!
I shall die so as to live!

Rise again, yes, you will rise again,
My heart, in the twinkling of an eye!
What you have conquered,
Will bear you to God!

This God doesn't build walls. He doesn't have someone sitting at the gate of heaven to weigh souls. He's not interested in seeing anyone roast in hellfire. He's just welcoming back the part of himself that lives in everyone and everything.

Mezzo Tamara Mumford
Photo courtesy of Opus3 Artists

As you may have gathered from the preceding, the "Resurrection" Symphony has long been a favorite of mine, going back to my first encounter with the classic Otto Klemperer recording from early 1960s. A kind of Mahler multivitamin, the "Resurrection" contains all the key elements of the Viennese master's work: moments of chamber-music delicacy alternating with massive orchestral outbursts, vulgar marches, lilting Ländler, a darkly comic scherzo, and passages of sublime beauty, and, of course, that overwhelming final movement. And yet, in the musical equivalent of alchemy, Mahler's sense of architecture somehow transmutes it all in to a single, unified work that brilliantly encompasses the themes of death, rebirth, and transcendence.

Done well, the work's final glorious moments of spiritual rebirth never fail to move one to tears.

If you'd like a more detailed breakdown of the work, there's quite a good one in this week's program notes. For a lighter point of view, there's a droll article at Britain's commercial classical music station Classic FM that includes video snippets of great conductors going into near-orgasmic states of ecstasy conducting the work's final moments. It's irreverent but not inaccurate.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Joélle Harvey (soprano) and Tamara Mumford (mezzo-soprano) in a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") Friday and Saturday at 8 pm September 27 and 28. Making her SLSO debut, Ms. Mumford appears as a substitute for Kelley O'Connor, who had to withdraw due to illness. Performances take place at Powel Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

Review: A trancendent Mahler 9th at the St. Louis Symphony

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Peter Oundjian

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In an increasingly ugly and paranoid culture, moments of transcendent beauty are rare, which is why I appreciate one all the more when I encounter it at a St. Louis Symphony concert, as I did this past Saturday (March 2nd).

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

It was more than a moment, actually, since "transcendent beauty" describes pretty much all of guest conductor Peter Oundjian's interpretation of Mahler's Symphony No. 9, which clocked in at around eighty minutes. Written towards the end of the composer's life (he died within two years of completing it and never heard it performed), the Ninth is often seen as Mahler's farewell to life. Mr. Oundjian's impassioned reading certainly honored that sense of departure, but did so in a way that suggested calm acceptance more than resigned despair.

That may not be a majority view of the work these days. The predominant idea of the Mahler Ninth for the past several decades seems to have been colored by Leonard Bernstein's contention, in the fifth of a series of six 1973 lectures at Harvard, that Mahler was anticipating not only his own death but the "death of music itself." Bernstein's own performance with the Vienna Philharmonic reflects that, wringing every last bit of angst out of the music. But, as Tom Service notes in a 2014 article for The Guardian, "there is another way of thinking about this music, and there's another way of conducting it, hearing it, and experiencing it. It turns on whether you think of this piece as a hymn to the end of all things, or instead, as an ultimately affirmative love-song to life and to mortality."

To my ears, Mr. Oundjian's approach was closer to the "ultimately affirmative" end of the spectrum, beginning with a first movement that had a strong rhythmic pulse and a kind of lilting lyricism that contrasted well with the first of the three massive orchestral climaxes the punctuate the rest of the movement. The tempo marking is Andante comodo, and Mr. Oundjian's tempo choices seemed to honor the fact that "andante" literally means "at a walking tempo." The orchestra played beautifully, with admirable solo moments such as the lovely duet with Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Principal Horn Roger Kaza that recalls Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.

The second movement, which is both an affectionate tribute to and parody of that rustic waltz known as the Landler, had all the requisite gusto and raucous humor. Musical jokes need to be played with consummate skill if they are to work, and the SLSO musicians certainly did not disappoint here. The final cheeky notes from Andrew Cuneo's bassoons and Ann Choomack's piccolo were perfect.

There's humor in the Rondo-Burleske third movement as well, but it's more along the lines of the snarling sarcasm you find in the works of Shostakovich. Mahler's tempo marking includes the words "sehz trotzig" (roughly "very defiant") and some have suggested that the mix of complex counterpoint and musical aggression here were the composer's angry response to critics who suggested, erroneously, that he couldn't write contrapuntal music. It was, in any case, performed with spectacular precision by the musicians, with a special nod due to Associate Principal trumpet Thomas Drake for the ethereal solo toward the end that, at least to my ears, harks all the way back to the deleted "Blumine" movement from Mahler's Symphony No. 1.

The final movement of Mahler's Ninth is perhaps one of the most moving things you can hear in a concert hall. It can be, at various points and to varying degrees, anguished, resigned, hopeful, or tranquil, but it's nearly always beautiful. Mr. Oundjian's interpretation reflected an ideal balance of the music's many moods, with powerful climaxes and moments of beatific stillness. This movement largely belongs to the string section, the SLSO players came through brilliantly, especially in the final, hushed pages when the music fades to nothingness.

Lars Vogt
Photo by Giorgia Bertazzi

In his Lucerne Festival Orchestra performance, Claudio Abbado famously held that final silence for a good two minutes. Mr. Oundjian didn't go that far, but the thirty seconds or so of absolute stillness he commanded at the end was a powerful as it was perfect. Amazingly, nobody coughed. Maybe they were all holding their breaths in the quiet: I think I might have been. It was the perfect end to a gripping, beautifully shaped performance by Mr. Oundjian and the orchestra that thoroughly deserved its standing ovation.

The concert opened with an equally intelligent and well-balanced performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21. First performed in Vienna on March 10, 1785 with Mozart himself at the keyboard, the concerto comes from a time in the composer's life when he was more or less the toast of the town. It radiates youth and optimism, and got an appropriately perky and joyful performance from Mr. Oundjian, the orchestra, and soloist Lars Vogt. I was especially taken with the Andante second movement, which managed to be lyrical without ever becoming sappy, but the noble first movement and jolly finale were gratifying as well.

Mozart was so much in demand when he wrote his concerto that he didn't bother writing down the cadenzas for the first and third movements, probably improvising them in performance. These days, soloists either use cadenzas composed by others or write their own. Mr. Vogt did the latter, deftly managing the trick of writing music that sounded both 18th-century and new at the same time.

Next at Powell Hall: Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with soprano Siobhan Stagg and baritone Stephen Powell, Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 9 and 10. The program consists of Stravinsky's "A Funeral Song" and Brahms's "A German Requiem." The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: A dying fall

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 2 and 3) Peter Oundjian conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a pair of works that were first performed in Vienna by two composers who were both, as Tim Munro points out in the SLSO program notes, "deeply associated with the city's musical life."

Mozart, as drawn by Doris Stock, 1789

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The works in question are Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467, and Mahler's Symphony No. 9. Both pieces had their premieres in Vienna--Mozart's on March 10, 1785, and Mahler's on June 26, 1912--but otherwise they have little in common. Mozart played the solo part in his concerto himself, for one thing, while Mahler died without ever hearing his symphony performed. And, of course, Mahler's symphony is around three times longer than Mozart's concerto, clocking in somewhere between 80 and 90 minutes.

Mozart's concerto exudes vigor and good cheer. It's the work of a young man (age 29) at the peak of his vitality. Mahler's weighty symphony is the work of an older man (age 49) in poor health.

Mozart wrote his concerto in an atmosphere of personal happiness. Mahler wrote his symphony in an atmosphere of sorrow stemming from the death of his daughter Maria (of scarlet fever and diphtheria in 1907), his own diagnosis that same year of heart disease, and the discovery that his wife Alma was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.

The concerto is a celebration of life while the symphony is a meditation on death.

Or is it?

The notion that Mahler intended his last completed symphony to be a farewell to life has been a popular one since Leonard Bernstein first proposed it in "The Twentieth-Century Crisis," the fifth in a series of six lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1973. Bernstein held that in the Ninth, Mahler not only anticipated his own death but the "death of music itself":

All his last pieces are kinds of farewells to music, as well as to life. Think only of Das Lied von der Erde, with its final Abschied ["farewell"], and that controversial unfinished 10th Symphony. Even that one, which tried to take a tentative step into the Schoenbergian future and which has undergone so many attempts at completion, even that 10th, remains for me basically the one completed movement which is yet another heartbreaking Adagio saying farewell. But it was one farewell too many. I'm convinced that Mahler could never have finished the whole Symphony even if he had lived; he had said it all in the 9th.

Leonard Bernstein in 1972
Photo by Allan Warren

Many conductors and writers have embraced this view of the Ninth. In program notes for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example, Phillip Huscher acknowledges that it is "often considered both [Mahler's] farewell and his most deeply personal score." A review of recent recordings for The Gramophone calls it a "death-haunted work," and the British musicologist Deryck Cooke (who produced a completion of Mahler's unfinished Symphony No. 10 in 1960) called the Ninth a "dark night of the soul."

"Gustav Mahler knew death," writes Mr. Munro in his notes. "Mahler himself felt vulnerable. Diagnosed with a serious heart condition, he could no longer rest and recharge on long walks in the woods. He knew his life would be cut short."

But is "come sweet death" (to quote the text of a Bach sacred song ) really the message behind the Ninth? Mahler apparently didn't act like a man who was ready to die. "His last four years," writes Mr. Huscher, "packed with conducting engagements, intense spurts of composition, and personal affairs (a meeting with Sibelius in 1907, posing for Rodin in 1909, and a single, dreaded, often-postponed session with Freud in 1910) hardly reflect the routine of an invalid." Tom Service elaborates on that at The Guardian, noting that "far from going gently into a sort of pre-deathly contemplation, Mahler was full of plans, action, and music in the years when he was writing the Ninth Symphony."

What it boils down to, I think, is that even if the Symphony No. 9 was Mahler's "farewell to arms," there are still multiple ways to say "farewell." Is Mahler the party guest who says, "it's almost midnight, I guess I have to leave" and then glumly slouches towards the door? Or he is the guy who says "it's almost midnight; better have a last drink and hug everybody before I go"? Or is he maybe a little of both? The remarkable thing about the Symphony No 9 is that, depending on how you look at it, any of those interpretations is possible.

As Mr. Service writes, "there is another way of thinking about this music, and there's another way of conducting it, hearing it, and experiencing it. It turns on whether you think of this piece as a hymn to the end of all things, or instead, as an ultimately affirmative love-song to life and to mortality." It's rather like one of those lenticular paintings that changes with the viewer's perspective. The Mahler Ninth that you hear depends heavily on the Mahler Ninth the conductor wants to present.

Mahler in 1907
Photo: Moritz Nähr
en.wikipedia.org

Mr. Service's article (which I keep quoting because it lays out the issues in such a clear and concise fashion) lists some recommended recordings that illustrate the variety of approaches Mahler's score supports. Claudio Abbado's 2010 live performance with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with its remarkable moment of silence at the end leans towards the "hymn to the end of things" approach, for example, as does Leonard Bernstein's with the Berlin Philharmonic. On the other hand, the 1938 Vienna Philharmonic recording by Mahler's friend Bruno Walter (who conducted the 1912 premiere of the Ninth) presents the "ultimately affirmative" view, as does Roger Norrington's version with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra at the 2011 London Proms. It's worth sampling bits of all four to give you an idea of the breadth of interpretive possibilities.

Mozart's concerto, which opens this weekend's concerts, is rather less ambiguous and far sunnier in its outlook. The brisk and impudent first movement, the dreamy second, and the energetic romp that is the rondo finale are clearly the work of a man looking forward to life rather than the afterlife. Mozart was riding high at the time and so much in demand that he had only completed the work the day before its premiere at Vienna's Burgtheater.

Speaking of which: because Mozart wrote the concerto for his own use, he didn't bother writing down the cadenza at the end of the first movement and probably improvised it in performance. Hence, as Betsy Schwarm notes in her Encyclopedia Britannica article, "modern concert pianists have had to either create their own cadenzas or use those created by others." It will be interesting to see how this week's soloist, Lars Vogt handles that.

The Concerto No. 21, by the way, is sometimes referred to as the "Elvira Madigan" concerto, after a 1967 Swedish film that used music from the second movement (performed by Géza Anda) to underscore some key scenes. Based on the true story of a 19th-century circus performer whose affair with a nobleman led to doom for both of them, the movie was a surprising hit worldwide, earning Cannes and Golden Globe awards. These days it's largely forgotten, which is likely why the SLSO program just calls it the Piano Concerto No. 21.

The Essentials: Peter Oundjian conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with pianist Lars Vogt, Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 2 and 3. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview, April 2 and 3, 2016: Child's play

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Does anybody out there remember Professor Backwards? His real name was James Edmonson, and from the 1950s to the early 1970s he entertained TV audiences with his comedy and his remarkable ability to read, write, and speak backwards.

Professor Backwards
(James Edmonson)

Gustav Mahler did something similar with his Symphony No. 4, which is the featured work on this weekend's concerts by the SLSO and David Robertson. He wrote the piece in reverse order, starting with the fourth movement and working backwards to the first.

Mahler wasn't going for laughs, though. Instead, he was rethinking and recycling a piece he had written earlier: the 1892 song "Das himmlische leben" ("Heavenly Life"), which describes heaven as it might be seen through the eyes of a child. An expanded version of the song was originally intended as the finale for his Symphony No. 3 (which the SLSO performed in the fall of 2012), but as his thoughts on that work developed, it became apparent that the song wasn't really going to fit in. Instead, he made it the culmination of a symphony of its own.

"Mahler had to plan parts of the Fourth Symphony from the end back," writes Michael Steinberg in program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, "so that the song would appear to be the outcome and conclusion of what was in fact composed eight years after the song. From a late letter of Mahler's to the Leipzig conductor Georg Göhler, we know how important it was to him that listeners clearly understand how the first three movements all point toward and are resolved in the finale."

Gustav Mahler
en.wikipedia.org

The fourth is the shortest of all Mahler's symphonies, clocking in at just under an hour, and it also uses the smallest orchestra. With over 80 players it's still large, even by late Romantic standards, but Mahler uses the instruments in smaller, more intimate configurations. The big climaxes of the third or fifth symphonies are largely absent here; instead, the fourth feels almost like chamber music most of the time.

And it just oozes charm. From the jingling sleigh bells that begin the work to the touching naiveté of the little song that closes it, this is music intended to engage and beguile the audience. "Many a love affair with Mahler has begun with the sunlit Fourth Symphony," writes Mr. Steinberg. "Mahler himself thought of it as a work whose transparency, relative brevity, and non-aggressive stance might win him new friends."

No such luck, as it turns out. "It enraged most of its first hearers," reports Mr. Steinberg. "Munich hated it and so did most of the German cities—Stuttgart being, for some reason, the exception—where Felix Weingartner took it on tour with the Kaim Orchestra immediately after the premiere." Conditioned by the first three symphonies to expect something of Olympian stature, listeners were apparently unwilling to recognize that Mahler was just being Mahler. "Today," continues Mr. Steinberg, "we perceive more clearly that what he was up to was writing a Mahler symphony, uncharacteristic only in its all but exclusive involvement with the sunny end of the expressive range."

Maurice Ravel in 1925
en.wikipedia.org

So maybe he was going for laughs, after all—or at least, for a nostalgic smile at the way this music evokes a kind of childlike innocence.

Childhood, in fact, is a recurring theme is this weekend's concerts, which open with Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose) Suite. It's a 1911 orchestration of some fairy-tale inspired pieces for piano four hands he originally wrote for Mimie and Jean, the young children of the composer's great friends Ciba and Ida Godebska. He had hoped the Godebska sibs would even give the first public performance of the work, but it proved too challenging for them—or at least for Mimie:

"Between 1906 and 1908," recalled Mimie three decades later, "we used to have long holidays at my parents' house in the country, La Grangette at Valvins. It was there that Ravel finished, or at least brought us, Ma mère l'Oye. But neither my brother nor I was of an age to appreciate such a dedication and we regarded it rather as something entailing hard work. Ravel wanted us to give the first public performance by the idea fill me with a cold terror. My brother, being less timid and more gifted on the piano, coped quite well. But despite lessons from Ravel I used to freeze to such and extent that the idea had to be abandoned."

Ravel got a lot of mileage out of those little pieces, using them not only for the suite you'll hear this weekend but also as the basis for a full-length ballet that premiered on 29 January 1912 at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris. The suite is a wonderfully evocative collection of little musical pictures of characters and situations which, as Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, owe more to Charles Perrault's retellings of classic folk tales than to Mother Goose. I'm particularly fond of "Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast)", if only because it gives the contrabassoon a rare opportunity to star as the voice of the Beast, but all five movements represent Ravel at his most engaging.

In between the Ravel and the Mahler is Lonely Child, a strangely otherworldly piece for chamber orchestra and soprano written by Canadian composer Claude Vivier for Marie-Danielle Parent, who first performed it with the CBC Vancouver Chamber Orchestra in 1981. The text, by the composer, is a sort of lullaby written in a combination of French and a language invented by the composer. "Bel enfant de la lumière dors, dors, dors, toujours dors," it begins. "Les rêves viendront, les douces fées viendront danser avec toi." ("Beautiful child of the light, sleep, sleep, sleep, forever sleep. The dreams will come, the gentle fairies will dance with you.").

Claude Vivier
magazine.icareifyoulisten.com

The child being rocked to sleep here just might be the composer himself "We can note," writes Mr. Schiavo, "that Vivier was given up for adoption at age three and grew up in a series of orphanages. As a child Vivier was afraid of the dark, and the words, both real and invented, may be consoling both an imaginary child and his former self." With its evocation of fairies, elves, wizards, and magical places, the text is certainly the sort of thing likely to sweep even the most recalcitrant child off to dreamland.

The music is perhaps less dreamy. There's a kind of restlessness and even tension here and there, and the eerie string harmonics towards the end sound like they might be more at home in a horror movie. But maybe that's just an acknowledgement of the fact that there can't be light without some darkness. Overall the music sounds both ancient and modern at once, rather like the work of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt with its deliberate references to Gregorian chant. It offers a nice contrast to both the Ravel and the Mahler.

The soloist for both the Mahler and the Vivier is Susanna Phillips, last seen on the Powell Hall stage in the orchestra's highly praised concert version of Britten's Peter Grimes in November 2013. She has an impressive resume, with leading roles at The Met, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Boston Lyric Opera, as well as guest soloist appearances with the San Francisco, Dallas, and Sydney symphony orchestras. The New York Times called her performance in Peter Grimes "radiant," so you know what to expect.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with soprano soloist Susanna Phillips in Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, Claude Vivier's Lonely Child and Mahler's Symphony No. 4 Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., April 2 and 3. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Concert Review: Adams and Mahler programs displays the St. Louis Symphony's strengths, January 23, 2016

David Robertson

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David Robertson and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are getting their act together and taking it on the road to sunny California this week and next, with appearances in Aliso Viejo, Palm Desert, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, January 27 through February 2. If what I saw in Powell Hall Saturday night is any indication, they're going to take the West Coast by storm.

Saturday's double bill of the John Adams "Saxophone Concerto" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" is one of two programs they'll be performing (the other is last weekend's multimedia version of Messiaen's "Des canyons aux étoiles...") and it couldn't be a better showpiece for both the orchestra and Mr. Robertson. That's because although the two works have little in common musically, they both present significant technical and artistic challenges.

Originally performed and recorded (for Nonesuch) by the SLSO in 2013, the concerto is not the most approachable of Adams's works, building its two movements from brief motifs that are so closely related it can be hard to tell them apart. It's edgy, aggressive music that requires a high degree of precision from both the orchestra and soloist. It also demands real endurance from the latter, since the solo sax is rarely silent for the concerto's thirty-minute length. Up on the podium, meanwhile, the concerto demands a conductor who can keep this musical express train from going off the rails and coming across as more a barrage of notes than actual music.

As they demonstrated both in 2013 and again Saturday night, Mr. Robertson and his forces can navigate this tricky score with ease. The jazz-inflected call and response sections, in particular, had the kind of snappy precision that called to mind the big band work of Stan Kenton. Mr. Robertson is obviously very comfortable with the concerto and made the compelling case for a work which, even upon second hearing, still sounds like a rather tough nut to crack.

Tim McAllister

The saxophone soloist, both here and on the road, is the man for whom Adams wrote the piece, Tim McAllister. Mr. McAllister is a brilliant performer, combining classical discipline with the freewheeling style of the great jazz and rock players whose work inspired Mr. Adams. He may have been dressed for the symphony but his stance—knees bent, head thrust forward in concentration—was that of the jazz soloist entirely wrapped up in the music. Mr. McAllister, as Eddie Silva points out in his program notes, was a champion stunt bicycle rider in his youth, and he brought that same daredevil-level fearlessness to his playing here.

Playing and conducting Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" (or any Mahler, if it comes to that) also requires a certain level of chutzpah. That's because it's both a massive work—five movements running around 70 minutes—and a complex one.

The first of what can be regarded as the composer's mature symphonies, it was the also the first of his symphonies with neither vocal soloists nor explicit musical references to Mahler's song cycles. And, as Michael Steinberg points out in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, there are other major structural changes as well:

After a run of unconventional symphonies, Mahler comes back to a more “normal” design, one that could be described as concentric as well as symmetrical...The music becomes leaner and harder. About this time Mahler acquired the complete edition of Bach. At least partly in consequence of his excited discovery of what was in those volumes, his textures become more polyphonic. But this new “intensified polyphony,” as Bruno Walter called it, demanded a new orchestral style.

Then there's the fact that Mahler, like John Adams, often drew inspiration from popular music styles. In Mahler's symphonies, it's not unusual to hear a saccharine ländler, an "oom-pah" march, or a clarinet wailing in the style that would later be labeled "klezmer"—sometimes rubbing shoulders with passages of real profundity. Some of Mahler's contemporaries sneered at what they regarded as vulgarity, but ultimately the composer's wide-ranging musical interests are really just a manifestation of his idea that, as he once told Sibelius, a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything."

All of this means that conducting Mahler, to my mind, requires not only a deep understanding of the capabilities of the orchestra's musicians but also a profound grasp of musical structure, along with musical sympathies that extend beyond those of the traditional concert hall.

Over the years, Mr. Robertson has demonstrated that he has those skills and knows how to apply them. His classical credentials are unimpeachable, of course, but he has shown that he's equally comfortable with film music and non-classical styles in general. Yes, I have not always been 100% persuaded by his Mahler symphonies in the past, but that's mostly a reflection of my personal taste. If I set that aside, I am obliged to acknowledge that his interpretations have always been of a very high order and sometimes (as was the case Saturday) superb.

From the first solo trumpet notes of the opening Trauermarsch (played so authoritatively by Karin Bliznik) to the wildly exuberant Rondo finale, this was a Mahler 5th that can stand with the best of them. I'd compare it favorably with Bernstein's 1964 New York Philharmonic recording, and that's saying something. At every point, Mahler's structure was clear, tempi were perfectly chosen, and all the elements of the work were in perfect balance.

Mahler's orchestration is filled with wonderful details that give nearly every section a chance to stand out. For example, Karin Bliznik and her fellow trumpeters Jeff Strong, Tom Drake, and Mike Walk carry a lot of narrative weight in the first two movements and on Saturday night did so beautifully. Roger Kazaa's horns (there are seven of them; Mahler doesn't stint) gave a real sinister rasp to their trills in the first movement and Mr. Kazaa himself was both poetic and powerful in the solo horn parts in the third movement Scherzo. Mr. Robertson had Mr. Kazaa move to the front of the orchestra for that movement; a smart decision that clarified the exchanges between the solo horn and the rest of the section.

The little major key chorale passage for trumpets and trombones in the second movement simply glowed. The famous fourth movement Adagietto for harp and strings (which the orchestra performed alone as part of Friday's "Music You Know" concert) was a touching mix of beauty and tragedy, with sensitive work by Principal Harp Allegra Lilly and the orchestra strings. And so it went, moment by impressive moment. If this doesn't knock their sandals off out there on the West Coast, I don't know what will.

The St. Louis Symphony returns to Powell Hall on Friday and Saturday, February 5 and 6, as violinist Anthony Marwood conducts an evening of chamber music by Bach, Dvorák, and Peteris Vasks. For more information, visit the SLSO web site, where you can also purchase tickets for all of the California performances.

Symphony Review, January 22, 2016: A fine romance

Percussionist William James

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This weekend was a busy one for David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony, with regular subscription concerts Friday morning and Saturday night and tonight and a Whitaker Foundation-sponsored "Music You Know" concert Friday night.

Initiated in the fall of 2014, the "Music You Know" mini-series (three concerts per season) features classical "greatest hits": relatively short works, most of which are likely to be familiar to regulars at Powell Hall. As was the case with the previous program in the series, there was also a local premiere—"Girlfriends Medley" by percussion virtuoso Bob Becker—but for the most part the music was tried and true.

Things got off to a galvanizing start with the overture to Smetana's 1865 comic opera "The Bartered Bride." Mr. Robertson adopted a tempo for the opening fugal section that might have been risky for a less disciplined string section, but Concertmaster David Halen and his forces came through with flying colors. Hearing them rip through those scurrying figures with such precision was a dose of sheer musical adrenaline.

The four selections from the incidental music Gabriel Fauré wrote for a 1900 production of Maeterlinck’s elusive and once-popular drama "Pelléas and Mélisande" that followed made for a nice lyrical contrast. The "Prélude" swelled with understated passion. The swirling strings of the "Entr'acte" (depicting Mélisande at her spinning wheel) cast an ethereal spell. The famous "Sicilienne" was a model of elegance, and Mélisande's death scene was profound in its tragic resignation.

The performance featured some fine solo work from (among others), Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Principal Harp Allegra Lilly, along with some fine playing by the double reeds and clarinet.

Bob Becker

The first half came to a big close with a spectacular display of xylophone virtuosity by Principal Percussionist William James in the "Girlfriends Medley." Originally written for percussion ensemble but re-scored here for xylophone and strings, the work is a ragtime-style mashup of three vaudeville-era songs that all have women's names in their titles—"My Little Margie," "Dinah," and one I'm embarrassed to say I didn't recognize. Mr. James's performance was a stunning mix of technical flash and musical elegance. If Fred Astaire had played the xylophone, it would have sounded like this. Mr. James got a well-deserved standing ovation.

The second half of the concert opened with the familiar "Wedding March" from Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" incidental music, a complete performance of which is on the SLSO bill next month, followed by the most weighty entry of the evening: the fourth movement "Adagietto" for harp and strings from the work that takes up most of the other concert program this weekend, Mahler's "Symphony No. 5."

As Mr. Robertson reminded us in his prefatory remarks, the movement is generally seen as the composer's musical love letter to his wife Alma and a profound musical statement of the sentiment that the world is a better place for the presence of one's love. But because nothing with Mahler is ever simple, there's also the suggestion, here and there, that love, like everything else human, is mortal and must pass.

The beauty and tragedy of this music was wonderfully conveyed by the orchestra's performance. Mr. Robertson let the music breathe, in accordance with the composer's sehr langsam ("very slowly"), but never allowed it become static (as I've heard happen with some performances). This was real "lump in the throat" material and completely captivating.

The evening came to a jolly conclusion with the second of two suites from Manuel de Falla's ballet "El sombrero de tres picos" ("The Three-Cornered Hat"). Mr. Robertson held the performance up as an example of why he loves to conduct this orchestra, and it was easy to hear why. It was a vibrant, exciting reading and a welcome opportunity for the percussion section to strut their stuff. The English horn solo in the final "Jota" had a nice bite as well. It was a welcome antidote to the cold and wind outside.

As Mr. Robertson pointed out in his remarks from the stage, last night's concert took place on the same date and same day of the week when, seventeen years ago, he made his debut with the SLSO. As if that weren't reason enough to celebrate the date, the soloist for that concert was pianist Orli Shaham, who would later become his wife. It's nice that we all got to help him observe the event with such an exemplary evening of music making.

The St. Louis Symphony begins a West Coast tour this coming week, so their next local appearance won't be until February 5 and 6, when violinist Anthony Marwood will conduct an evening of chamber music by Bach, Dvorák, and Peteris Vasks. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview, January 22 and 23, 2016: As the world turns

John Adams
Photo: Lambert Orkis, earbox.com

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The second and more substantial half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony double bill consists of only two works: John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," which the SLSO recorded in 2014, and Mahler's powerful "Symphony No. 5," which hasn't been heard here since 2009.

The Adams was a joint commission from the SLSO, the Boston Symphony, the Sao Paulo Symphony, and David Robertson’s Other Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony (where it had its first performance in August of 2013). When I first heard it in 2013, I found the concerto a tough nut to crack from a musical structure standpoint, largely because Adams’s style had developed to the point where entire movements were constructed from brief motifs that were so closely related it was often hard to tell them apart.

The long first movement of the concerto, for example, unfolds from a short, snappy rising arpeggio for the solo sax. That sense of rapid upward movement remains even when, towards the end, the mood shifts to the kind of sultry nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir. The second and final movement—based on a two-note descending figure often embellished with cascades of notes in the solo part—ups the ante with a hyperkinetic solo line that rises to a classic jazz wail just before the final notes.

Timothy McAllister
timothymcallister.com

At the time I wasn't sure whether the concerto itself warranted repeated hearing, so it will be good to get reacquainted with the piece. Better yet, the soloist is once again the ferociously talented Timothy McAllister, whose 2013 performance melded classical virtuosity with a real jazz sensibility.

At well over twice the length of the Adams concerto, the Big Dog on the program is the Mahler symphony. It's a work of sharp contrasts, with moments of pure poetry alternating with massive orchestral assaults. "Doors suddenly open to totally unfamiliar scenes," writes Eddie Silva in his program notes, "or to themes you thought had been used up, only to return, sometimes menacingly.”

But then, that's quintessential Mahler. "[A]ll of Mahler's music", wrote his great champion, Leonard Bernstein, in 1967, "is about Mahler—which means that it is about conflict."

Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs. Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the Believer vs. the Doubter; the Naïf vs. the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian Philosopher vs. the Oriental Mystic; the Operatic Symphonist who never wrote an opera. But mainly the battle rages between Western Man at the turn of the century and the life of the spirit.

That paragraph is also quintessential Bernstein, and its verbosity could not be more appropriate for its subject. For Mahler was nothing if not musically verbose. His musical gestures are invariably grand and, surprisingly for a man who essentially wrote nothing for the stage, brilliantly and aptly theatrical. Here's Bernstein again:

He took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the clichés, and drove them to their ultimate limits. He turned rests into shuddering silences; upbeats into volcanic preparations as for a death-blow. Luftpausen became gasps of shock or terrified suspense; accents grew into titanic stresses to be achieved by every conceivable means, both sonic and tonic. Ritardandi were stretched into near-motionlessness; accelerandi became tornadoes; dynamics were refined and exaggerated to a point of neurasthenic sensibility. Mahler's marches are like heart attacks, his chorales, like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the moment of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n.

Bernstein could have been Mahler reincarnated. Given that he was born several years after Mahler died, maybe he was.

But I digress.

"Photo of Gustav Mahler by Moritz Nähr 01"
by Moritz Nähr (1859–1945)
Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia

Mr. Silva provides a concise road map to the symphony in his notes, so there's no point in my providing one here. The Wikipedia article on the work is also worth a read, especially since it includes examples of the principal themes and shows how they're developed over the symphony's 70-minute (or thereabouts) length. Allow me to recommend as well Michael Steinberg's San Francisco Symphony program notes for their in-depth analysis and their illumination of the relationship between the 5th and its predecessor, which briefly (and somewhat mysteriously) quotes the opening trumpet fanfare in its own first movement.

According to musicologist Donald Mitchell, Mahler once told Sibelius that a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything." Mahler's 5th, with its incredible dynamic and emotional range and the kaleidoscopic brilliance of its orchestration, is the composer's world, to be sure. But its triumph, tragedy, and even its grotesque comedy are our world as well.

The essentials: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson presents John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," with soloist Timothy McAllister, and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., January 22 and 23. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Sounds of joy and despair at Powell Hall Saturday and Sunday, November 22 and 23

There are only two pieces on the program this Saturday and Sunday at the symphony, and even though they were written less than 60 years apart, the contrast between them is so stark that they might as well be from different worlds.

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Schumann in 1850
en.wikipedia.org

The concerts open with Robert Schumann's "Cello Concerto in A minor," op. 129. It dates from 1850, which SLSO program annotator Paul Schiavo describes as "a watershed year" for the composer. "His 40th birthday was celebrated with a concert organized by his admirers," writes Mr. Schiavo, "and after what seemed an interminable series of delays his only opera, Genoveva, was finally produced in Leipzig. At about the same time, the composer accepted the directorship of the municipal orchestra and chorus in Düsseldorf and in September moved with his family to that city on the Rhine. The Duüsseldorf appointment represented a significant professional advance for Schumann, and he was cheered at the prospect of finally gaining some measure of the recognition which had thus far eluded him."

Schumann's joy would be short lived—he would try to commit suicide three and a half years later by throwing himself into the Rhine—but for time being the composer was on top of the world, resulting in music that was, in the words of the late British musicologist Eric Sams, "as secure and buoyant as the Rhine itself, with hardly a hint of the dark chill depths to come."

That said, the concerto wasn't all that well received, despite the skill evident in its composition. As with the earlier piano concerto, Schumann disdained the kind of flashy virtuoso writing that typified concertos in the mid-19th century (Liszt and company were very much in fashion). Worse yet, he disapproved of the applause between movements (which was commonplace at the time), so the three sections of the concerto follow each other without pause. Schumann didn't even call it a concerto originally; the autograph score describes it as a Konzertstück (concert piece) rather than Konzert (concerto). Clara Schumann loved the work, but the composer himself seems to have had doubts, not even sending to his publishers until 1854. It wasn't performed publicly until 1860, almost four years after the composer's death.

The lack of obvious fireworks in the cello part doesn't mean that this piece is easy to perform, though. Quite the opposite: it requires for a combination of technical facility and artistic sensitivity that asks a lot from the soloist. As cellist Jan Vogler noted in a 2012 interview, although he had already performed the concerto over 60 times, he was just getting "to the point where he can see the light."

The soloist this weekend, Principal Cello Daniel Lee, certainly looks like the right man for the job. As I wrote in my April 2012 review of his performance of the Dvorak concerto (which, like the Schumann, requires nimble hands and a warm heart), Mr. Lee combines technical proficiency with an emotional openness that allows him to be completely within the moment at every point in the music.

Mahler in 1907
Photo: Moritz Nähr
en.wikipedia.org

If Schumann's concerto comes from a high point in his life, Mahler's "Das Lied on der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth") comes from a low point in his. When Mahler bean work on the piece in the summer of 1907, his eldest daughter has just died of scarlet fever at the age of four and the composer himself had just been diagnosed with the heart condition that would lead to his demise four years later. Suddenly death—which had always been a theme in Mahler's music—became very personal.

Scored for large orchestra and two singers (typically tenor and mezzo-soprano, although Mahler allows for the substitution of a baritone in the second, fourth, and sixth songs), "Das Lied" is essentially a vocal symphony that takes its texts from Hans Bethge's "The Chinese Flute," a German-language re-write of English, French and German translations of some ancient Chinese poems. Further edited and re-written by Mahler, the lyrics contemplate a variety of aspects of life and death. "Every mood," writes Tony Duggan at musicweb-international.com "from cynical and drunken hedonism to serene and Zen-like stasis gets covered in the course of the hour this work takes. At the end, the message is that, since the beauties and mysteries of the earth renew themselves year after year, our own passing should not be feared but accepted calmly and without rancour. The earth, the world and nature goes on without us."

Too true. In particular, the last movement—"Das Abschied" ("The Farewell")—is possibly one of the most emotionally powerful things you will ever encounter in a concert hall. In it, the narrator's farewell to a friend becomes a farewell to life itself: "Die liebe Erde allüberall Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen! Ewig... ewig..." ("Everywhere the good earth blossoms in spring and turns green once again! Everywhere and forever, distant spaces shine their blue light! Forever...forever..."). "The music of this closing movement," writes Mr. Schiavo "is...by turns heartbroken and serene, and this remarkable dualism persists even in the unresolved sixth—the most gentle of dissonances—which colors its final chord."

This weekend's soloists, Susan Graham and Paul Graves, have impressive but very different resumes. Ms. Graham's is heavily tilted towards opera while Mr. Graves appears to have substantial oratorio and concert experience. That should make for a nice balance in a work that straddles the concert and opera stages. Although he never wrote an opera, Mahler was a composer with an infallible sense for the dramatic.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, tenor Paul Groves, and cellist Daniel Lee in Schumann's "Cello Concerto" and Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., November 22 and 23. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis public radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and via the station web site.

Chicago Capsule: Voices of spring

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

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Who: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti
What: Music of Schubert and Mahler
When: June 19 - 21, 2014
Where: Orchestra Hall, Chicago

June 19 through 21, Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony are offered a pair of symphonies which, while originating in vastly different musical and cultural worlds, still have their roots in a love of nature and the sense of renewal that comes with spring.

The connection is most obvious in Mahler's 1881 "Symphony No. 1," with its hushed, expectant opening, its birdcalls, and what CSO program annotator Phillip Huscher calls "the gentle hum of the universe, tuned to A-natural and scattered over seven octaves." Schubert's 1816 "Symphony No. 5," though, has always had a sunny, "spring is here" feel for me as well. The association seems even more obvious when they're heard back to back.

As was the case with the Schubert 1st and 6th symphonies earlier in the week, Muti took a relaxed and elegant approach to the 5th, emphasizing the music's Mozartian grace. The little G-minor digression in the second movement has never sounded so wistfully sad—dark clouds are never far away from the sun in much of Schubert's music—and the performance as a whole was simply irresistible.

The Mahler that followed intermission was simply one of the most riveting and dramatically coherent performances of this wonderfully excessive symphony that I have ever heard. In his tempo choices (surprisingly slow for the first and last movements) and his ability to maintain a coherent musical and dramatic line, Muti reminded me a great deal of legendary Mahlerians like Bernstein and Walter.

The Mahler 1st has had a difficult history—audience and critics found it baffling from the beginning—and the episodic nature of the writing poses significant challenges to conductors. Muti held it all together nicely, though, with a beautifully and intelligently shaped performance. You never got the sense (as one sometimes does with this symphony) that the entire business was about to come to a screeching halt.

And he did that while still highlighting the chamber music–like moments and striking solo passages that alternate with Mahler's heaven-storming outbursts. Principal bass Alexander Hanna gave us an appropriately Hitchcockian funeral march in the third movement, for example, and the little dance band parodies in the woodwinds were delightfully cheeky. I heard details in the harp and strings that I had never heard quite so clearly before.

The big orchestral bits, meanwhile, were as overwhelming as you could wish. The CSO has a hefty violin section and that, combined with Muti's sure hand and the hall's acoustics, insured that the strings were never swamped by the brasses—which were both powerful and accurate. The percussion section performed with admirable precision as well.

This was, in short, a virtuoso effort by one of America's finest orchestras.  For more information on the Chicago Symphony: cso.org.

[This is the second of two capsule reviews from Chicago, where I attended the Music Critics Association of North America annual conference.]