54
San Francisco Symphony
Above: Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 and Kindertotenlieder with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung. Below: Tilson Thomas, producer Andreas Neubronner, soprano Laura Claycomb, and Musical Assistant to the Music Director Peter Gurnberg look over the score while recording Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with the San Francisco Symphony.
San Francisco Symphony
Terrence McCarthy
not just as a summing-up of the AustroGerman tonal tradition, but as a composer who speaks with a voice that is our voice. Today his angst is our angst, his tormented extremes and breathless beauties reflect perfectly the dizzying complexity and shrill clamor of the 21st century. The composer who said that a symphony should encompass the whole universe seems a natural for a globally connected generation with the vastness of all knowledge available at the click of a mouse. “In a funny way Mahler has become the great iconic classical composer of our age,” says New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, noting that in some recent New York seasons, audiences have had the opportunity to hear more Mahler than Beethoven. “Almost every week at Carnegie Hall someone is showing up with Mahler, making “If you me feel a little fatigued perform even in advance of the Mahler year.” Mahler’s During the 2010-11 music in the season, Mahler’s mustudio, there’s sic will be the center of one important celebrations internationally and, just to name a element that’s few U.S. cities, in New missing,” says York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But it’s also a John Kieser, testament to the ubiqdirector of uity of Mahler’s music, operations perhaps, that some orand electronic chestras are not celebrating excessively during media at the the Mahler year, or are San Francisco at least spreading things out. The New York PhilSymphony. harmonic, whose Mahler “How the legacy dates back to the composer’s own presence audience at its helm in 1909-11, is is reacting stretching the music over is a crucial multiple seasons. The Ravinia Festival and the part of the performance.” Chicago Symphony Orchestra have chosen 2010 to conclude their cycle— with the Adagio from the Tenth Symphony— after having programmed two Mahler symphonies per summer for several
seasons, all of them led by Ravinia Music Director James Conlon. They learned, during a well-remembered season in 1979, when James Levine programmed the CSO to perform all the symphonies in a single summer, that one can have too
much of a good thing. “People look back longingly and say, what a great thing that was for Ravinia,” says Festival President and CEO Welz Kauffman, adding with a laugh: “But nobody went. It’s one of those ideas that look better on paper.” And the symphony
september–october 2010