When dealing with Gustav Mahler, nothing is easy. His music captures everything from the infinitesimal to the infinite; from the local to the cosmic. Each of his symphonies is a David Lean film that becomes a soulful journey for listener and performer alike. They cover life, death, heaven, hell, nature, love, sorrow and everything in between. Mahler is a serious affair.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have begun The Mahler Project this past weekend, which will survey the composer’s nine completed symphonies in just more than three weeks. This is an overwhelming amount of material to perform in such a short period. The Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra (the Venezuelan youth orchestra from which Gustavo came) will be in town to present half of the works, and they will join the Phil side-by-side to perform No. 8 at the project’s conclusion. That event will feature 1,050 musicians and singers. After that, the Phil will follow the Bolívars to Venezuela to do it all over again. Down there, No. 8 will feature 1,600 performers. I repeat: Mahler is a serious affair.
Last Saturday night, Dudamel showed that he and the orchestra were fully prepared for this incredible journey with a masterful performance of Symphony No. 4. But before that, the group offered us a way into the Mahler psyche through his “Songs of a Wayfarer,” the first-ever orchestral song cycle and what is considered to be Mahler’s first “mature” work. Its four songs, musically interdependent, tell a hero’s sorrowful story of being rejected by his beloved to marry someone else and how he struggles to ward off the sadness by looking to nature for happiness and inspiration.
The Phil was in exquisite form, highlighting transparency and delicacy. Baritone Thomas Hampson beautifully contrasted the hero’s joy and heartbreak with sensitive lyricism. When, in the second song, Hampson sang of the sunshine making the world glitter, the orchestra produced a sound that felt like the warmth of the sun, simulating the stillness and quiet of being outdoors when you can see waves of heat along a dirt path. Dudamel maintained an air of genuine uncertainty throughout, making a connection to the hero’s spontaneously shifting mood.
Symphony No. 4 is considered Mahler’s most accessible, along with Symphony No. 1. Based on the same book of German folk poetry that was used by “Songs of a Wayfarer” and many of the other works he was writing during this period of his career, it emphasizes youth and tunefulness. The work was extrapolated from a song featured in the fourth movement that gives a child’s view of heaven. In the first movement, which famously opens with sleigh bells, there is a good deal of counterpoint and polyphony but the articulation and sense of structure drawn out by Dudamel made everything clear and distinct. A lighthearted spookiness marked the second movement, in which concertmaster Martin Chalifour used a second violin that was tuned one tone higher to achieve a fiddle-like, eerie sound of a danse macabre.
There’s no question that the evening’s most magnificent moments occurred in the long, slow third movement. There was a fragility and tenderness that was supremely touching. Dudamel was at his most skilled while keeping these delicate moments intact, and the strings never faltered. The opulent soprano Miah Persson’s description of heaven in the final song was pure and bewitching. With looks of happiness from all involved at the evening’s conclusion, the Mahler Project was splendidly underway. Los Angeles and music lovers listening in from all over are in for an amazing journey.
