Last night at Disney the Wayfarer songs and the 4th symphony. Intense Mahlerian voluptuousness and emotional meandering, but not too much of it. A perfect start to the Mahler Project.
Thomas Hampton sang the four Wayfarer songs mostly with his eyes closed. Eyes closed, shaking his head and trembling with rapture. Perhaps overdoing it, but with such music overdoing it is never out of place.
Hampton wasn’t the only one: throughout the concert I kept spotting musicians sitting with their heads tilted back, with their eyes closed, soaking up with anguished deliciousness. What must it feel like to sit in the middle of those sounds!
Last night I was struck how in the very first song of his very first song cycle Mahler had perfected his characteristic effect of emotional discord. Bits of thoughtlessly cheerful folk tunes are presented ironically. The soloist guides our experience. The words fill in the details (rejected lover faces his beloved’s wedding day) The effect is intensely dramatic rather than intellectual. The bitterness takes your breath away. And in the midst of it, the soloist announces, in song, “Alles Singen ist nun aus! / All singing must now be done.” It’s a Thomas Hardy novel condensed to 15 minutes.
Throughout the piece, Lou Anne Neill detonated deep percussive thuds on the harp.
A decade and a half later, in his 4th symphony, Mahler explores less straightforward kinds of emotional discord. Each of the sections wanders freely over the widest possible range of moods. (Why did he bother with section divisions at all?) It’s stream of consciousness, one thing after another, and can induce disorientation. Which is certainly part of the point.
And through it all there are moments of beauty and strangeness. Mahler generously distributes these throughout the orchestra, so that almost all the musicians can have a moment to shine. Andrew Bain, playing a beautiful non-shiny antique French horn, had more than a few of these moments. The soloist Miah Persson sang the concluding strange naïve folk poem with a combination of guilelessness and poise that was perfect. “Kein' Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden, / Die unsrer verglichen kann werden. // There is just no music on earth / that can compare to ours.”
[Image: Sisley, 1873, Autumn: the Seine at Bougival]
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