Every time I listen to Mahler, I feel like I’m in my 20s again. The whiplash emotional states, the seething, the intensity, and romance. Actually, it’s all right there still, just beneath the surface, but I try to keep a lid on it these days. Now that I’m in my 50s, I’m too old to be storming heaven all the time and hurling myself into volcanoes.
Even so, it’s nice to remember once in a while by revisiting the symphonies in concert, and last night Sir Simon Rattle brought one of the angstier ones to Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, when he led the touring Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. Sometimes identified by the nickname the “Tragic,” this one has all the vertiginous highs and de profundis lows one expects from this composer – Mahler making good on his pronouncement (to Sibelius, no less) that a symphony must be like the world: it must embrace everything!
So we get plenty of foreboding and ardent love music and weird macabre passages, crashing cymbals, and eerie harps, and most notoriously, that magnificent hammer delivering the blows of fate. Of course, I’m not convinced it always has quite the effect Mahler intended, as he was savagely lampooned for it in his lifetime, and even last night it elicited big grins and conspiratorial nods from the audience. When you want to suggest something very serious, it’s probably a good idea not to have your percussionist solemnly ascend stairs to a riser to swing a five-foot Bugs Bunny style circus mallet. That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I’ve seen Rattle conduct Mahler before, of course, in the days when Philadelphia was trying way too hard to land him as its next music director. Back then, he was certainly an effective interpreter, if sometimes prone to mannerisms (which I understand he may not yet have fully shaken, though they were not on display in yesterday’s performance), in particular his obsession with bringing the music’s pianissimos down to a ridiculously hushed level.
None of that was in evidence last night, and it was satisfying to watch and hear the Bavarians rise to the occasion and ride a few killer waves, especially in the last movement. But for me, the ardent second movement was the most magically sustained, a passionate andante moderato played for all the sublimity it was worth. Rattle opted, as many do, for the composer’s original ordering of the movements, with the scherzo placed third. (Mahler had second thoughts after conducting the symphony’s first performance and decided to flip the scherzo and the andante.) In this movement, I swear, you can sense the love music for virtually every big budget fantasy movie of the 1980s – not quoted outright, necessarily, but completely in spirit. Back in the days when the movies were still wondrous and did wonderful things to your insides, much the way Mahler’s symphonies do.
Hearing Mahler in concert also reminds me just how important it is to experience these things live. The composer was a master orchestrator, and the 6th is full of unusual touches (the strange duets between Masque-of-the-Red-Death harps and leviathan brass, the bird of prey multi-cymbal effect at the end, and of course, that carnival hammer (ring the bell and you win a cigar!) that just won’t have the same impact when listening on record. Also, in these days of attention deficit classical radio, when’s the last time you heard a complete Mahler symphony, if it doesn’t turn up on a broadcast concert?
Bravo to Sir Simon, recalled again and again – at least five times – and his German musicians, who each embraced their neighbors as the applause finally began to subside in a kind of life-affirming group hug.
I would be dead by now if I continued to live my life as tightly-wound as, and at the fever pitch conjured in, Mahler’s symphonies. But it’s nice to remember once in a while what it was like to seethe and combust.
Beneath the authoritative gaze of Sir Simon: with fellow Mahlerite Robert Moran at the Kimmel – but who is that forehead-slapper photobombing us?
