All the Austrian cool kids had canes Sure, January 2011 already happened, and here's some fruit from labor that occuring during that month: my feature story for the classical section of our February issue:
With a running time of about 100 minutes, Gustav Mahler’s ‘Symphony No 3 in D minor’ is one of the longest pieces in the orchestral repertoire. Performances are visually and sonically overwhelming, often with a stage-busting orchestration of more than 100 instrumentalists, two choirs and a vocal soloist. It’s not surprising that a live concert doesn’t happen too often. This month at the Concertgebouw, listeners will be treated to the work’s melodic magnitude twice.
Amsterdam’s all-amateur CREA Orkest and the professional Berlin Philharmonic will each embark on the six-movement behemoth, by no small coincidence: 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the late-romantic Austrian composer’s death. Over the course of the year, various ensembles will offer additional performances, each with its own vision. Amsterdam, however, needs no special occasion to love Mahler; the city and the composer go way back.
Drawn to the acoustic superiority of the Concertgebouw, around the turn of the 20th century Mahler premiered his own creations in the prestigious hall 11 times over the span of seven years and developed a strong professional relationship with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s long-time chief conductor, Willem Mengelberg. These premieres were generally well received by audiences that were altogether excited by Mahler’s fame as a composer, allured by the high-profile aura of the Mengelberg connection and conditioned to appreciate (or rather, desire) Mahler’s style of complex and layered music from like-minded Dutch composers of the time, such as Alphons Diepenbrock.
These weren’t short musical sketches Mahler was sharing with Amsterdam, either. Many of them were brand new symphonies, vast emotional works that he agonised over and revised for several years. ‘We’re talking about huge sound poems – sometimes based on the texts of Goethe or Nietzsche – not the easiest to digest,’ explains Sven Arne Tepl, artistic manager for the Stichting Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest, ‘but Amsterdam was ready for that challenge. In the culture of that time, people were very much searching for deeper meaning in things.’
A tradition of repeated Mahler performances developed as trust between artist and audience grew. This was helped by Mengelberg passing musical values (original scores with notes from the master himself and revolutionary conducting theories) of Mahler on to his successor, Eduard van Beinum. From Van Beinum, Bernard Haitink inherited the Mahler influences and continued to keep the composer as a part of the orchestra’s core business.
Even today, seasoned Concertgebouw performers still feel the Mahler love while in the hall. ‘The audience knows just what they are hearing,’ says Andreas Wittman, oboist and orchestra chairman for the Berlin Philharmonic. ‘It changes the quality of the concert, the atmosphere is different and it’s an inspiration for the artists.’
Tepl agrees. ‘It does something to you as a performer, when you stand exactly on the place where Mahler stood 115 years ago,’ he says.
A new generation of young performers will get to feel that when the CREA Orkest performs a Mahler symphony on the historic stage. Jonah Stunt, a 25-year-old anthropology and medicine student who plays first violin, says she’s particularly excited for the deeply emotional and eerily beautiful final movement titled ‘What love tells me’. ‘It’s so great, I get chicken bumps,’ says Stunt.
The CREA Orkest will feature the symphony by itself, while the Berliners will frame it with short works by Hugo Wolf and Brahms.
Mahler’s music has an independently captivating essence that hasn’t lost anything in 100 years, proving our city’s classic good taste. ‘It’s always the situation of how you come in and listen to it,’ says Tepl. Hearing the soul-searching struggle in Mahler’s epic ballads of harmony and discord, ‘you get confronted with your own struggle, with yourself,’ he adds. ‘It will always meet you at exactly that moment and open you up to reinvent yourself.’
