London Symphony plays Mahler's Seventh

Gustav Mahler is so much a part of the modern concert repertory that it takes an effort to recall the decades after his death in 1911 when he fell into near-obscurity. His Romanticism was considered hypertrophic, and the sheer length of his scores— most demanding an entire evening to themselves— seemed grandiose. If Anton Webern could get an entire symphony into nine minutes, what justification could there be for demanding 90?

This reaction began to change around the time of Mahler's centennial in 1960, in good part (although not solely because of) Leonard Bernstein. Lenny fell in love with Mahler, and his enthusiasms weren't easily dismissed: he repeated them if you were unimpressed the first time around, and he had a bully pulpit in the New York Philharmonic.

Bernstein was certainly sincere— nothing, ever, if not sincere— but there was a political subtext to the Mahler revival too. Although the taste of the 1920s was uncongenial to his music, with the rise of Hitler it was banned pure and simple in Germany and, after 1938, in Vienna too, where Mahler had once been the dominant musical figure.

By the 1960s, the shoe was on the other foot. The Holocaust had begun to transform postwar culture, and when Bernstein, exploring his own Jewish roots, found in Mahler an iconic precursor, the stage was set not only for a revival but for a historic revaluation unparalleled in music since Mendelssohn "rediscovered" Bach.

The assimilated Jew

Mahler's First and Fourth symphonies, the shortest and most accessible in the canon, were the first to gain renewed acceptance. The Resurrection Symphony achieved popularity soon after, no doubt due to its intrinsic merits but also for its diffusely humanistic spirituality, a quality reflected in Bernstein's own sacred works of the '60s. This development, too, wasn't accidental: Mahler, the assimilated Jew, gained his cultural cachet as the poster child of late Romantic religious eclecticism, just as Bernstein made a similar genuflection in the direction of Christian tradition in his Mass.

The later Mahler symphonies, together with the gargantuan Third, trooped in afterward. The last six of them, though ranging from two to five movements, are all roughly 80 minutes long, and all but the Eighth are composed for purely orchestral forces.

The last to arrive, as the Ugly Duckling of the series, was the Seventh, which Valery Gergiev brought to Verizon Hall on February 22 with a group appearing there for the first time: the London Symphony.

Like a Watteau painting

The Seventh is sometimes coupled with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies as Mahler's Viennese trilogy, for all three were composed while he was director of the Vienna State Opera. Like the Fifth, the Seventh consists of five movements, with a broadly arching Langsam—Allegro risoluto ma non troppo that's followed by two scherzo-like movements (the first of which is titled Nachtmusik I, though it's vigorous and scarcely nocturnal).

The fourth movement (Nachtmusik II) is in the nature of an intermezzo, serving a function not dissimilar to that of the famous Adagietto of the Fifth, although with its prominent role for guitar and mandolin it has an almost Watteau-like patina.

The finale returns to the drama of the opening movement, bringing back its principal theme as well. This, too, parallels the Fifth Symphony, but whereas the Fifth has a sense of overall unity and design (even if a deeply self-contested one), the Seventh, despite the rétablissement of themes at the end, doesn't resolve itself into a whole, but seems more suite-like: a congeries of disparate and contrasting elements that resists final definition.

Musical equivalent of Proust

Since Mahler knew perfectly well how to write a dramatically cohesive score— his Sixth Symphony had been a particularly striking example— one can only conclude that he had other intentions in the Seventh. There's certainly no lack of quality in the music, which for impulse, invention and orchestral ingenuity is fully the equal of its brethren; and on its own terms, the Seventh is an entirely satisfying experience— only of a different kind.

In a way, then, the Seventh is Mahler's most "modernist" work, a symphonic counterpart to what Proust, Joyce and Musil would attempt in their novels: namely, depiction without closure. At the same time, however, it looks back to the older tradition of Tchaikovsky's large-scale orchestral suites, and even to the serenades of Mozart.

Up against Verizon's acoustics

The London Symphony Orchestra is Britain's best, and its brass section was in particularly fine form. It couldn't overcome the dampening effects of Verizon Hall, though, which made individual voices— so critical in Mahler— at times difficult to hear. (The LSO plays in the Barbican Centre, which is also a graveyard of symphonic sound.)

It takes a particular kind of forcefulness and discipline to overcome such obstacles, and Gergiev was only intermittently successful in this task. He took parts of the score at very brisk tempos, coming in at 73 minutes against the usual 80 (or more).

Any Gergiev performance will have its sharp edges and accents, too, and this Seventh was no exception, though there was some excellent legato playing as well. Philadelphia was a side-stop for the LSO, which has been performing a partial Mahler cycle in New York. The sold-out audience was obviously glad they'd taken the train down.