Yannick and the Orchestra (3rd review)

"Mahler had not much to say in the Fifth Symphony and occupied a wondrous time in saying it. His manner is ponderous, his manner imponderable."
"“ New York Sun, December 5, 1913


By rights, Gustav Mahler should have fallen into obscurity as a late Romantic composer who wrote grandiose symphonies and moribund song cycles that went nowhere and expressed emotional preoccupations of little interest to anyone but himself. Indeed, with the exception of a coterie of admirers, Mahler's reputation lagged, which he himself confessed to be well deserved, in the early 20th Century.

Yet, in the last few decades, his music has"“ like the theme of his Second Symphony"“ been "resurrected," drawing concertgoers and attracting the interest of musicologists, critics, and composers. These days, orchestras and choruses go to elaborate lengths to accommodate his grander compositions, such as the Eighth "Symphony of a Thousand." Mahler, a hopeless Romantic among the heathen modernists such as Schoenberg and Webern, has been vindicated.

In his debut concerts as the Philadelphia Orchestra's future musical director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin gave us a back-to-back comparison of Haydn's "Military Symphony" with Mahler's Fifth. Like Mahler, Nézet-Séguin is a young, gifted and enthusiastic conductor who in a short time established his competence and was then given an opportunity to lead one of the great world-class orchestras (for Mahler, it was the Vienna Hofoper).

Like Mahler, he is a noted opera conductor, and like Mahler, he brings exceptional ambition, vigor and discipline to a stellar ensemble. Also like Mahler, Nézet-Séguin is a perfect match for his orchestra, a group of exceptional musicians crying out for new leadership. (One hopes, however, that Nézet-Séguin won't encounter the conflicts that Mahler did with his orchestra!)

Moreover, Nézet-Séguin enthralls audiences in much the same way as Mahler did. His interpretive style is precise, powerful and full of momentum, adhering closely to the score.

Firmly in command

In this concert, Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave a performance that excited an audience hungry for that fabulous Philadelphia sound and for a fresh, young conductor with the capability to make the most of it. He took both the Haydn and the Mahler symphonies at a rapid clip, made the most of dynamic changes, and showed a command of both the music and the orchestra.

With an excellent sense of timing and dramatic tensions, Nézet-Séguin brought out some features of Mahler's music that illustrate why Mahler deserves a place among the great symphonic composers.

Via Nézet-Séguin's fast-paced, lucid and powerful performance— for which the Orchestra is also to be thanked— one could vividly discern Mahler's mastery of the orchestral ensemble: its instruments, their timbres: and all of its possibilities for elaboration. Although Mahler adhered to the Romantic tradition, he was truly a modernist in the way he elaborated upon it with surprising shifts of sound and mood that almost evoke a postmodern pastiche quality.

Mahler went where his ideas and emotions took him, and developed the structure and form he needed as he went along. In some respects he was an impressionist, evoking sensations, pictures, and memories throughout.

Modern for his time

For instance, the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony is rich with evocative motifs with a folk flavor, contrasting strongly with the funereal grief that inhabits the rest of the very serious and lengthy piece. The music switches from one theme to another, one dynamic level to another and one tempo to another in ways that are modern and innovative for their time.

Another feature of the music that was beautifully brought out by Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestra is Mahler's development of new sonorities, using novel (for his time) combinations of instruments, such as horn and clarinet in unison to establish strikingly evocative orchestral sounds. In this respect he was inspired by Richard Strauss, who in turn came to admire Mahler's music greatly.

Eighty years of music for film would simply not be what it is without Mahler's influence. Whether by Ennio Morricone or John Williams, the Mahler influence is pervasive. Moreover, Mahler set the stage for the powerful, conflicted introspections of composers like Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. Nézet-Séguin's tight and precise conducting manner brought out more than others' interpretations of those modern features of Mahler that foreshadowed the music that was to come.

Where's the angst?

Not everything can be accomplished in any given performance, and the conductor's very strengths also limit what he can bring to the music. In this case, Nézet-Séguin's combination of straight-ahead pacing and highly charged drama paradoxically left Mahler's introspective, emotionally painful aspect understated. Throughout Nézet-Séguin's conducting, love, desire, excitement, tempest and triumph won out over grief, angst and nightmarish agony.

The musicologist Robert Greenberg has correctly likened Mahler's music to the Abstract Expressionist movement in art, the quintessential painting of which is Edvard Munch's The Scream, which portrays in color and shape the feeling of torment and anxiety that pervaded turn-of-the-century Europe. Part of the significance of Mahler for young people who soon were to experience two world wars was his ability to express what they too were to feel.

Grasping sadness

Today, with our "positive psychology," Facebook façades and Brave New World attempts to eliminate all pain and suffering, are we starting to lose our "acquaintance with grief," and with it some of our humanity? Will it be harder for us grasp the profound sadness of the Fifth Symphony's Adagietto, which Visconti used as background music to the sad, ironic twist of fate of Gustav von Aschenbach in the adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice?

Certainly this weekend's audiences preferred the crispness and youthful optimism of a Nézet-Séguin to the kind of feeling that Bruno Walter and even Leonard Bernstein brought to their interpretations of the Mahler symphonies. Thus it's quite possible that Nézet-Séguin will bring just the enthusiasm and discipline that Philadelphia and its famed Orchestra need to recover from a time of economic recession and a world troubled by seemingly unsolvable problems.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here
To read another review by Dan Coren, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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