Tilson Thomas conducts Mahler's Fifth

The German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno once likened Beethoven’s music to a great man walking down the street, and Mahler’s to a man pretending to be a great man walking down the street. That isn’t quite fair, although it’s probably what one ought to expect from a man who entitled one of his books Negative Dialectics.

There’s a certain waspish insight in the observation, though. Beethoven’s work displays itself. So does Mahler’s, but it also displays itself displaying. You couldn’t be a turn-of-the-20th-Century Viennese intellectual without doing that.

All of Mahler’s symphonies, like Beethoven’s, are so transformative that it’s hard to pick one for preference. The Fifth, though, revolutionized music through the sheer density of the micro events that comprise its texture.

You can’t easily discern that in our town without a score, because the sound in Verizon Hall (will our time ever escape the shame of deifying corporations where great art is performed?) is in most places such a wet blanket that it buries detail. It’s essential, though, to hearing the full story of Mahler’s sonic landscape, and to understanding that he never says one thing without saying several others simultaneously that question, modify, or contradict the seeming thread of his symphonic argument. This is emphatically true of the Fifth, and the difficulty of finding its ultimate coherence is what makes it so tempting to misperform as a darkness-to-light story of redemption.

The frenzy keeps going

The fact that the symphony begins with what Mahler describes as a funeral march sets up such a scenario, but such titles mean simply that the composer is wrestling with his angel, his Angst, and his huge post-Romantic orchestra. Certainly nothing is laid to rest in this movement; and the churning, scherzo-like movement that follows it (Stürmisch bewegt) keeps the frenzy going. Yet there are moments of exquisite delicacy and repose in what Mahler called Part I of the score, including the extraordinary episode for low strings that occurs midway in the second movement, a completely self-contained rumination that seems a world away from the choppier goings-on that preoccupy the rest of the music.

The breather doesn’t come in the long central movement, marked Scherzo: Kraftig, nicht zu schnell, which constitutes “Part II” and hands the obbligato duties off from trumpet to horn. The complexities only multiply here, and the mood swings become more pronounced.

Then Mahler offers us a stunner: the famous Adagietto, scored for strings and harp alone, that is frequently performed separately, was famously abused in the Visconti film of Death in Venice, and is, for the pops crowd, the Favorite Gustav. It’s certainly the most straightforwardly direct and tuneful music Mahler ever wrote, which isn’t saying a great deal, since Mahler was constitutionally incapable of writing anything simple or pretty. In the context of the Fifth Symphony, though, it’s a lyric pause that clarifies textures and provides a deeply welcome break from the Sturm und Drang of the preceding movements.

Almost hysterical string writing

Is it a bridge, though, to the finale, in the way that, say, the fourth movement of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet is? That’s a matter of taste and interpretation, I suppose. For me, it’s an intermezzo that sits athwart the main argument that is taken up again in the fifth and concluding movement. The mood is less conflicted in this Rondo Finale, but no less complex, and the strident, almost hysterical string writing that accompanies the last bars warns us off regarding anything very affirmative or triumphant here.

Visiting conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s performance of the score was mannered in the way Christoph Eschenbach (who seems to be flourishing in his post-Philadelphia career) was often accused of being, with exaggerated ritards and long, breathless sighs. He made the Adagietto, which Mahler didn’t intend to drag, into a virtual endurance feat.

Thomas is a pupil of Leonard Bernstein and a disciple of the late maestro’s acrobatics as well. With his beaky features and trim figure, his podium antics almost begged for some 19th-Century caricaturist. The orchestra gave him what he asked for musically, particularly trumpeter David Bilger and hornist Jennifer Montone, despite a notable fluff at the beginning of the third movement.

A forgotten Copland symphony

Things went better in the work that opened the program, Aaron Copland’s 1924 Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. Copland’s Third has been so long ensconced as the great American symphony that it’s easy to forget that he wrote two others. The one at hand, his First, is an oddly configured piece, with a short, meditative opening movement in the nature of an overture. This was apparently the result of rethinking, since the score was originally intended as a four-movement work but lost one of its parts along the way. The jazz-inflected middle movement has the character of a bricolage, but with much fertile energy and ingenious orchestral writing.

Much the same is true of the finale, where the organ weighs in heavily. Copland perhaps had second thoughts about this too, since he later rescored the work without organ. The original version, made to order for Verizon Hall’s gigantic and underutilized pipes, was the natural choice here, with Paul Jacobs performing vigorously. It’s hard to integrate the organ into a symphony orchestra— ask Saint-Saëns— and the writing was mazy at times. But it was good to hear the young Copland, flexing his muscles and bursting with ideas in what he clearly intended as a major orchestral debut piece.

Many conductors would have been content to program the Mahler Fifth alone, but Tilson Thomas doesn’t give short weight. In an era when, prices being what they are, the concertgoer is frequently charged a dollar per minute of music, full measure is something to be savored.