MahlerFest XX: Boulder,Colorado, USA, 10 – 14.01.2007 (MF)

If this were a plot for a novel, it would be turned down as hopelessly naive:  A relatively unknown conductor starts a yearly festival dedicated to the life and music of Gustav Mahler.  He schedules the event for the middle of winter – in Boulder, Colorado, no less.  His budget the first year is $400.  He recruits volunteers because he can’t afford to pay anyone.  Implausibly, the event grows.  They move to a bigger hall.  They make a landmark recording, then another.  Mahler scholars from all over the world start attending.  The cycle repeats.  Then, lightning strikes:  they are awarded the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft’s (IGMG) Gold Medal for promoting Mahler’s cause, an honor shared with only one other American orchestra, some outfit called the New York Philharmonic.  And then they coax one of the world’s greatest baritones to come to Boulder for performances of perhaps Mahler’s greatest work, Das Lied von der Erde.  With what is essentially still an amateur band.  Couldn’t happen, right?

Well, it happened.  The twentieth Colorado MahlerFest was held January 10-14, 2007.  MahlerFest’s founding fathers, conductor Robert Olson and MahlerFest board President Stan Ruttenberg, convinced Thomas Hampson to come to Boulder for two performances of Das Lied von der Erde.   I’ll talk about this year’s remarkable MahlerFest, but the evolution of the event is interesting in itself.

All twenty Colorado MahlerFests, which are held on the Colorado University campus in early to mid-January, have featured a particular Mahler work, starting with the 1^st Symphony and proceeding more or less chronologically.  But the orchestral concerts, which crown the festival week, are only one part of it.  There are open rehearsals, chamber concerts, and seminars as well.  In various years there have been drama, ballet, cinema, and even art exhibits pegged to MahlerFest’s featured work.  The open rehearsals provide a fascinating view of the piece-by-piece creation of a Mahler symphony; under Olson’s guidance the orchestra’s progress is nothing short of remarkable.  The chamber concerts typically – but not exclusively – feature Mahler songs.  Given the composer’s relatively limited output, however, MahlerFest organizers soon realized that the chamber concerts could be aimed at illuminating the featured symphony, not just be a venue for the performance of songs that were heard comparatively recently.  For example, in recent years there have been works by Alma Mahler and Zemlinsky, a performance of Winterreise – by chamber concert organizer Patrick Mason, who this year has been nominated for a Grammy for his recording of songs of Amy Beach – and songs by other composers who have set the same texts as Mahler.  For only the second time, this year there was not one Mahler song on the chamber program; instead, Patrick programmed a number of songs set to Chinese and Japanese texts in a successful attempt to show how other composers responded to the Asian stimulus that led Mahler to create Das Lied von der Erde.  Far from being a single-tracked event that excludes other composers and art forms, Colorado MahlerFest is a veritable Gesamstkunstwerk of events devoted to Mahler.

No history of Colorado MahlerFest would be complete without mention of the Gold Medal.  Bob Olson and Stan Ruttenberg had been working together for 18 years, building MahlerFest from strength to strength.  One day in 2005, with no advance notice, Stan received E-mail notification of the Gold Medal award.  He told me he felt like smacking his computer to make sure there was no mistake.  But it was true:  Colorado MahlerFest, a volunteer, nonprofit organization, had won the Gold Medal.  The mostly amateur orchestra, which gathers only once a year for little more than a week, had become the first American orchestra – the NYPO received the award the same year – to receive the IGMG Gold Medal.  The list of winners, which is available by drilling down at http://www.gustav-mahler.org/, shows the exalted company in which Colorado MahlerFest found itself.  It was truly an improbable, remarkable, achievement.

This year’s Colorado MahlerFest was notable for the participation of Thomas Hampson, who is not only one of the world’s finest baritones but is also a Mahler scholar in his own right and Vice President of the IGMG.  Hampson, a resident of Vienna, arrived in the cold, dry air of Boulder, elevation 5,430 ft (1,655 m), and probably wondered what he had gotten into.  But he acclimated quickly and became a full participant in MahlerFest activities.  Hampson attended the chamber concert and gave an individualized master class, which was open to the public, to four Colorado University students.  This priceless – in both senses of the word – experience was a tour de force of Hampson’s voice expertise, teaching ability, and knowledge of Mahler.

Many people, me included, think the best part of any MahlerFest is Saturday, the day of seminars.  In years past, Colorado MahlerFest has hosted Henry-Louis de La Grange, Donald Mitchell, Stephen Hefling, and other world-renowned experts in Mahler scholarship.  This year the keynote speaker was Hefling, who has spoken to several MahlerFests and is the author of the Cambridge Music series book on Das Lied.  Stephen demonstrated how Mahler had shown an affinity to Eastern thought even before he was given Hans Bethge’s book, The Chinese Flute.  Several authors had already piqued Mahler’s interest in the East; by the time Mahler read the book, Stephen said, “the pump was primed.”  Several other speakers also gave interesting talks.  Eveline Nikkels, president of the Netherlands Mahler Society, talked about “signposts” on the way to Das Lied, and commonalities between Schubert and Mahler.  Robert Olson talked about the difficulties of conducting Das Lied and the Adagio from Mahler’s 10^th Symphony, which was the other piece on the orchestral concert program.  Thomas Hampson spoke about several things, including an interesting story about how he first met Leonard Bernstein.  Filmmaker Jason Starr previewed his upcoming documentary on Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony.  After a break, musicologist Marilyn McCoy described how Mahler manipulated time in several works, including two Das Lied songs.  Colorado University professor Steve Bruns showed the unlikely links between Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (No. 45), Mahler’s 10^th Symphony, Das Lied, and George Crumb’s Night of the Four Moons.  And in the day’s most off-beat presentation, Chris Mohr, a mountain climber and Mahler enthusiast, told us of his long and ultimately successful grassroots campaign to rename a Colorado mountain Mt. Mahler.  The slides he showed proved that Mahler would have felt at home in the Rockies, and that there is no topic too small for Colorado MahlerFest as long as it pertains to their hero.

If all this activity makes it sound like the concluding orchestral concerts were afterthoughts, that is assuredly not true.  The MahlerFest Orchestra under Robert Olson performed the Adagio from Mahler’s 10^th Symphony – in the Wheeler edition, which received its world premiere by the same forces in 1997 – and Das Lied von der Erde with an intensity that left us limp.  This Das Lied was the still infrequently heard – but Mahler-sanctioned – version with two male voices.  Jon Garrison, who sang Das Lied during MahlerFest’s first cycle, was in excellent voice in songs 1, 3, and 5.  In the even-numbered songs, Thomas Hampson fully justified his reputation as one of the best baritones in the world, and it will be hard for anyone who was there to believe there can be a better Mahler baritone anywhere.  The two excellent audiences, undeterred by the two smallish snowstorms that hit Boulder during the week, roared their appreciation for the MahlerFest Orchestra, Bob Olson, Jon Garrison, Thomas Hampson, and Gustav Mahler.

Next year’s Colorado MahlerFest will feature two rarely heard Mahler works, the three-movement version of Das klagende Lied and Totenfeier, the originally stand-alone movement that, after Mahler excised 29 bars, became the first movement of the 2^nd Symphony.  While I am not a member of the MahlerFest board, I have been coming to Boulder for six consecutive Januarys; I hope to make January 2008 my seventh.  You can see more Colorado MahlerFest information at www.mahlerfest.org.

Mitch Friedfeld