Mahler introduction

MAHLER ANNIVERSARY

What Mahler says to us today With the help of Vladimir Jurowski, Jeremy Barham guides us through the Orchestra’s Mahler celebratory season.

A

s we embark on the celebratory 2010/11 Mahler season (150th anniversary of his birth and 100th of his death), it gives us pause to reflect on what Mahler the composer – not to mention the arranger and conductor – ‘says’ to us in the second decade of the 21st century. Much good and bad has happened in the intervening years, suggesting that the human condition remains as conflicted as it was in Mahler’s own times of imperialist and ethnic tensions, wars, and even laissez-faire market crashes. ‘My time will come’ was his famous dictum, but in a media age that has progressed from the shellac disc to a global downloading culture, even he could not have predicted just how widely his music would be disseminated. His continuing popularity suggests that somehow we need Mahler.

After all, wouldn’t you just die without him?, as Maureen Lipman’s somewhat morbid Trish suggests in the film Educating Rita.

‘Rehearsing and performing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with Klaus Tennstedt was like being born, living and dying all in one week.

Klaus lived, breathed, suffered and died with the music.’

JONATHAN SNOWDEN PRINCIPAL FLUTE, 1985-93

Vladimir Jurowski continues his exploration of Mahler’s music in this celebratory season.

Mahler does indeed sometimes bitterly and brilliantly acknowledge the frailty of life, but far from wallowing in glum self pity he crucially offers us some of the most sublimely uplifting responses to the dark matter of our lives – moments of pure beauty and clarity of thought which transfix and transfigure. Such is the universe of contrasts that characterises Mahler’s art.

For the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, this commemorative Mahler season gives an opportunity to continue his journey of discovery, his conquering of the Mahlerian mountain, as he puts it, in the same fashion as the composer – for he has attempted, as far as practically possible in his conducting career, to come to each work in chronological order, in the firm belief that Mahler’s oeuvre charts its own, partautobiographical, part-philosophical unfolding narrative, often negotiating the fine musical divide between ‘truth and effect’ and thereby laying down the challenge to every subsequent interpreter of his works never simply to accept but always to question.

As a teenager in Russia, Jurowski embraced the then underperformed Mahler as his ‘great hero’, hearing something very Russian, very East-European, in the music’s melodic style and tonal flavour, that acted like an awakening of his ‘genetic memories’ of shtetl and folk cultures. We can feel this atmosphere strongly evoked not just in the startling Hasidic dance music of the funeralmarch third movement in the Symphony No. 1 – a highly provocative symphonic debut in 1888 if ever there was one – (to be conducted by Jurowski, in its fivemovement Hamburg form with the addition of ‘Blumine’, on 4 December 2010), but also in the Czech-Bohemian wind-and-brass-dominated soundworld of the Wunderhorn songs such as ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ and ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’ (1895 and 1901). Mahler was masterly at combining memories of the folk and militaristic sounds that impinged on his eversensitive ears from the Bohemian world of his youth, with ‘high-art’ song and symphonic structures, sometimes creating a cultural and musical dissonance that contemporary critics found disturbing, at other times producing the most delicate and poignant scenarios of love, loss and redemption, or earthy celebrations of nature and ‘Heimat’. (Jurowski ends his Mahler season with selected songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn performed by Christian Gerhaher on 28 May 2011.)

Seeing Mahler ‘in reverse’ through the lens of his symphonic heir Shostakovich, also led

Gustav Mahler pictured in the Vienna Opera House in 1907.

Photo: © Lebrecht Music & Arts

‘In a concert Klaus Tennstedt seemed to know if I was playing a piece for the first time. With the whole score of Mahler 2 to conduct he would be with me for all the second horn “moments”but not in an interfering way, just the encouragement of “yes, it’s now”. It has proven rare to be cared for in such a manner.’

GARETH MOLLISON HORN

Photo: © Roman Gontcharov

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Yearbook 2010/11

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MAHLER ANNIVERSARY

What Mahler says to us today With the help of Vladimir Jurowski, Jeremy Barham guides us through the Orchestra’s Mahler celebratory season.

A

s we embark on the celebratory 2010/11 Mahler season (150th anniversary of his birth and 100th of his death), it gives us pause to reflect on what Mahler the composer – not to mention the arranger and conductor – ‘says’ to us in the second decade of the 21st century. Much good and bad has happened in the intervening years, suggesting that the human condition remains as conflicted as it was in Mahler’s own times of imperialist and ethnic tensions, wars, and even laissez-faire market crashes. ‘My time will come’ was his famous dictum, but in a media age that has progressed from the shellac disc to a global downloading culture, even he could not have predicted just how widely his music would be disseminated. His continuing popularity suggests that somehow we need Mahler.

After all, wouldn’t you just die without him?, as Maureen Lipman’s somewhat morbid Trish suggests in the film Educating Rita.

‘Rehearsing and performing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with Klaus Tennstedt was like being born, living and dying all in one week.

Klaus lived, breathed, suffered and died with the music.’

JONATHAN SNOWDEN PRINCIPAL FLUTE, 1985-93

Vladimir Jurowski continues his exploration of Mahler’s music in this celebratory season.

Mahler does indeed sometimes bitterly and brilliantly acknowledge the frailty of life, but far from wallowing in glum self pity he crucially offers us some of the most sublimely uplifting responses to the dark matter of our lives – moments of pure beauty and clarity of thought which transfix and transfigure. Such is the universe of contrasts that characterises Mahler’s art.

For the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, this commemorative Mahler season gives an opportunity to continue his journey of discovery, his conquering of the Mahlerian mountain, as he puts it, in the same fashion as the composer – for he has attempted, as far as practically possible in his conducting career, to come to each work in chronological order, in the firm belief that Mahler’s oeuvre charts its own, partautobiographical, part-philosophical unfolding narrative, often negotiating the fine musical divide between ‘truth and effect’ and thereby laying down the challenge to every subsequent interpreter of his works never simply to accept but always to question.

As a teenager in Russia, Jurowski embraced the then underperformed Mahler as his ‘great hero’, hearing something very Russian, very East-European, in the music’s melodic style and tonal flavour, that acted like an awakening of his ‘genetic memories’ of shtetl and folk cultures. We can feel this atmosphere strongly evoked not just in the startling Hasidic dance music of the funeralmarch third movement in the Symphony No. 1 – a highly provocative symphonic debut in 1888 if ever there was one – (to be conducted by Jurowski, in its fivemovement Hamburg form with the addition of ‘Blumine’, on 4 December 2010), but also in the Czech-Bohemian wind-and-brass-dominated soundworld of the Wunderhorn songs such as ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ and ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’ (1895 and 1901). Mahler was masterly at combining memories of the folk and militaristic sounds that impinged on his eversensitive ears from the Bohemian world of his youth, with ‘high-art’ song and symphonic structures, sometimes creating a cultural and musical dissonance that contemporary critics found disturbing, at other times producing the most delicate and poignant scenarios of love, loss and redemption, or earthy celebrations of nature and ‘Heimat’. (Jurowski ends his Mahler season with selected songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn performed by Christian Gerhaher on 28 May 2011.)

Seeing Mahler ‘in reverse’ through the lens of his symphonic heir Shostakovich, also led

Gustav Mahler pictured in the Vienna Opera House in 1907.

Photo: © Lebrecht Music & Arts

‘In a concert Klaus Tennstedt seemed to know if I was playing a piece for the first time. With the whole score of Mahler 2 to conduct he would be with me for all the second horn “moments”but not in an interfering way, just the encouragement of “yes, it’s now”. It has proven rare to be cared for in such a manner.’

GARETH MOLLISON HORN

Photo: © Roman Gontcharov

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Yearbook 2010/11

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Photo: © Lebrecht Music & Arts

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classical musician you don’t get very far’. Few works explore these extreme challenges and philosophical quests more powerfully than the vast Third Symphony (1896) with which Jurowski opens the Mahler season on 22 September 2010. Cosmic in its aspirations and radical in its extension of symphonic structure and its demands on players and conductors, this work perhaps comes closest to living up to the composer’s famous epithet that ‘the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’.

This season the Orchestra also seeks to honour Mahler as one of the greatest interpreters of his age by presenting his intriguing and less frequently performed re-orchestrations or ‘arrangements’ of Beethoven’s Third Symphony The hut at Toblach where Mahler (30 October 2010) and String Quartet in F minor composed his Symphonies Nos 9 and 10 and Das Lied von der Erde.

Op. 95 (scored for string orchestra), as well as the ‘Suite from the Orchestral Works of JS Bach’ first performed in New York in 1909 Jurowski from his early years to appreciate the very close affinities (both 20 April 2011, all under Jurowski). Mahler’s re-working of that Mahler had both as composer and conductor with a Russian pieces in the classical canon came under considerable critical fire, tradition headed by Tchaikovsky, whose operas Eugene Onegin, especially in conservative Vienna where he was Director of the Iolanta and The Queen of Spades Mahler championed and Court Opera (1897-1907), so what was he hoping to achieve? premièred outside Russia (Hamburg 1892 and 1893, and Vienna Jurowski explains: ‘If you see what [Mahler] did to his own works, 1902 respectively). Indeed the repeated, four-note ascending ‘love you understand why he did the same thing to Beethoven… He theme’ heard near the beginning of the last of those operas is a wanted to achieve maximum clarity… changing some of the lines, close precursor to the rising melodic adding instruments to the line… all of it idea that pervades Mahler’s Fifth is done with one aim: to clarify the ‘I have vivid memories of a fabulous Symphony (conducted this season by texture, to make the structure of the performance of Mahler 7 in the the Orchestra’s Principal Guest music audible and palpable’. This was Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in the spring very much part of courageous 19thConductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin on of 1991 conducted by Bernard Haitink. It century performance practice – before 19 January 2011) and especially the famed Adagietto movement, written by we became obsessed with the 20th was a crazy “there and back in one day” Mahler as a musical ‘love letter’, a ‘song century Urtext (or original) concert and the first oboe was missing for without words’, to his young wife Alma. the first half of the rehearsal. It turned out phenomenon – and is especially Tchaikovsky’s final Symphony, the indicative of the kind of co-creative that he had fallen asleep in a park! Despite approach of conductor-composers such ‘Pathétique’, which Mahler grew to these problems it was one of the most admire after initial resistance, no doubt as Mahler that Jurowski cherishes and wonderful and inspiring performances of whose legacy he sees remnants of in also provided something of a model for what would turn out to be Mahler’s the commanding work of latter-day my career. I will never forget it.’ own last completed Symphony, the Mahlerians like Bernstein: ‘We have to FIONA HIGHAM VIOLIN Ninth (1910), with its yet more heartunderstand that Mahler was a practical rending Adagio finale (and we should remember that the Russian man… I’m convinced that had he ever heard his own works word ‘patetichesky’ actually means ‘passionate’ or ‘emotional’ performed in the Royal Festival Hall he would have rewritten them rather than ‘pathetic’). Christoph Eschenbach conducts Mahler’s all. For that reason I don’t think one should ever consider his final Ninth along with his youthful first song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden version of symphonies really final in the sense that this is the Gesellen on 25 February 2011 in an arc-like summation of Mahler’s ultimate word of the composer.’ Bold statements indeed, but creative trajectory. reminding us that at times Mahler himself did alter the Influenced by conductors such as Boulez, Gielen and Horenstein, instrumentation of his works to reflect the acoustics of a particular who ‘delivered a different Mahler’ and compelled him to think of hall, and that he also exhorted future conductors of his music to Mahler anew, Jurowski approaches a work such as the Symphony make similar changes as they saw fit, for he believed that they had No. 1 first by assiduously studying the various editions and not only the ‘right’ but also the ‘duty’ to do so. versions, picking apart layers of unresolved interpretative issues, According to a set of creative chain reactions, Jurowski explains, and then by inciting his performers to rethink well-established just as ‘the key to understanding Mahler’s Wunderhornlieder is his routines. This is how Jurowski keeps alive the all-important earliest work Das klagende Lied… the most gruesome and horrorMahlerian legacy of challenge, risk and danger. It is also a clue to like fairy tale he could have chosen for his Opus 1’, and just as what he considers is part of Mahler’s message to us today: ‘the certain Wunderhorn songs are re-processed, with and without their way is everything… the interesting and terrifying thing with Mahler texts, in Symphonies 2, 3 and 4, sharing their preoccupations with is that you cannot reach the horizon… with the usual tools of a second-hand stories of nature and life in all their joy and

Photo: © Kaplan Foundation Collection/NY/Lebrecht

desolation, so ‘Kindertotenlieder is the key to the three middle with Nézet-Séguin). Jurowski admits that he is in general drawn to symphonies [5, 6 and 7] – a mature take on life and death – on a ‘conceptualist art’, music that contains deeper levels of meaning much higher level, more abstract’. It is fortunate then, that as that one can only glimpse and begin to unravel when hearing it listeners we have the opportunity to absorb this broader integrated live. These two works epitomise that mixture of eloquence and vision of Mahler’s musical voyage in the coming season. Jurowski mystery that marks out all of Mahler’s music in various ways. ‘I gives Das klagende Lied in its original three-movement version breathed a delicate fragrance. In the room stood a spray of lime…

(29 January 2011), convinced that only with the inclusion of the the delicate fragrance of love’, ‘I live alone in my own heaven, in my opening ‘Waldmärchen’ can the full dramatic impact of the love, in my song’, ‘At midnight I kept watch and looked up to cantata’s Wagnerian tale of fratricide, guilt heaven; no star of all the host of stars smiled and vengeance be conveyed. Even at such an ‘I well remember Klaus Tennstedt’s on me at midnight’ (Rückertlieder 1, 3 and 4); early stage in his life (1880), Mahler was ‘Dark is life and so is death!’, ‘the dear earth child-like enthusiasm. To see him keenly aware of the theatricality of the everywhere blossoms in spring… and forever trying to coax a set of clanging performance space – listen out for the work’s the distance shines bright and blue!’ (Das Lied cowbells into his idea of Mahlerian von der Erde, movements 1 and 6). How to remarkable deployment of off-stage rusticity in the Symphony 6 was an approach Mahler? Yes, read the texts, find out ensembles to evoke both physical distance and psychological isolation. The Fourth something of the culture of his time and how experience in itself.’

Symphony (1900), a homage to Viennese he responded to it, but as these elliptical and KEITH MILLAR PERCUSSION classicism from ‘a man with the soul of contrasting lines suggest, and as Jurowski Schubert’, but ending unusually with the Wunderhorn song ‘Das and Mahler himself advise, there is a residue of mystery that himmlische Leben’ as a delicate glimpse of utopia, can be heard on performed music alone can address. It was only when performing 4 December 2010: ‘There’s no music at all on the earth which can and experiencing music, Mahler admitted, that he sensed the ever compare with ours’, chant the residents of paradise in the final answers to the most profound existential questions. ‘Approach verse. In a switch of gear, the achingly poignant expressions of music from the heart’, Jurowski urges, for sometimes ‘just having hope and despair that form the Kindertotenlieder (1901-4, texts by this music, being in contact with it seems perfectly enough’.

Friedrich Rückert) are performed on 27 October 2010, providing a During this season of remembrance and homage, Mahler’s musical and emotional entrance point to the Symphony No. 6 message will inevitably speak to us in new and challenging ways directed by Jaap van Zweden (14 January 2011). This work sees whether intellectual, emotional or spiritual, and that is both our Mahler returning to the standard four-movement symphonic and his just reward. format, but though the outer structure is tight, the orchestral forces and narrative scope are huge, and the expressive impact devastating, as the composer turns music into a metaphor for the Jeremy Barham is Senior Lecturer in Music at the ecstatic joys and terrifying tragedies of our very existence. Finally, University of Surrey. He has published extensively the scent of the East infuses the middle-period Rückertlieder from on Mahler, including The Cambridge Companion 1901-2 (17 November 2010 under Kazushi Ono) and their cousin, to Mahler and Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. the late work from 1909 Das Lied von der Erde (19 February 2011

Mahler and his wife, Alma, strolling in the hills near their summer home in Toblach in 1909.

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