Mahler, Symphony No. 3:  Gerard Schwarz, cond., Ewa Podles, contralto, Seattle Symphony, Northwest Boychoir, Women of the Seattle Symphony Chorale,  Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 1.7. 2007 (BJ)

 

Last year Mahler’s voluminous and problematic Seventh Symphony ended the Seattle Symphony’s subscription season with a performance that had our out-of-town guests astonished at the quality of the orchestra. This time, it was the turn of the Mahler Third, an even more voluminous but less problematic work, to send subscribers home happily for the summer, and once again music director Gerard Schwarz rose nobly to the occasion.

Completed when Mahler was 36 years old, the Third Symphony marked perhaps the last occasion on which this neurotic and deeply insecure composer was able to make a supremely direct, positive, and–for all its vast 100-minute duration–uncomplicated declaration of joy of life. It is a stupendous, encyclopedic, simple-hearted symphony–the only simple-hearted piece Mahler ever wrote–that tackles the world and emerges triumphant.

I've heard conductors play the final slow movement, to which in a letter Mahler gave the title “What love tells me,” at all sorts of tempos. Leonard Bernstein’s recording took about 25 minutes over the movement, but at his farewell concert many years ago as the New York Philharmonic’s music director he was even slower–the movement played for very nearly half an hour, whereas Sir Georg Solti on at least one occasion zipped insouciantly through it in well under 20 minutes, in the process making it sound like a Salvation Army march. I was waiting with interest to see where Schwarz’s performance would figure along this continuum, and in the event, his timing was very close to the Bernstein recording’s 25 minutes.

What such experiences show is that pulse is a much more important factor in determining musical results than mere tempo. The secret of performance, after all, like the secret of composition, is getting from Point A to Point B. Like Bernstein, Schwarz never for an instant let the music sag. It didn't sound slow; it just sounded right, and it concluded a performance that fully realized nearly aspect of the work both interpretatively and in terms of orchestral execution. There were eloquent woodwind solos in abundance, characteristically secure and expressive contributions from all the brass sections, and some superbly disciplined and often ravishing work from the strings, particularly the second violins, who achieved prodigies of soaring tone in the last movement. Frank Almond too, sitting in as guest concertmaster, played beautifully.

The symphony’s fourth and fifth movements also include vocal parts, and the choral element was skillfully provided by the Northwest Boychoir and the women of the Seattle Symphony Chorale. For me, the only serious disappointment came with the performance of the important alto solo. Ewa Podles, one of the rare true contraltos now before the public, possesses a magnificent voice, but her singing evinces habits that I find infuriating. She will insist on veiling her tone, so that her opening phrase in the mysterious fourth movement, “O Mensch,” came out sounding like “O Mönch,” as if Nietzsche had addressed his poem not to mankind but to a monk. She takes breaths in the wrong places, on this occasion splitting adjective from noun in the phrase “Was spricht die tiefe [gulp] Mitternacht” and verb from subject in “Doch alle Lust will [gulp] Ewigkeit”–and these lines, though demanding, are not so long that they can’t each be done in one breath. Worst of all in this context, she was almost continuously too loud: aside from crescendo and diminuendo hairpins, the only dynamic indication for the solo singer in her two movements is pp, and given that the prevailing orchestral dynamic here is an even softer ppp, it surely ought not to be beyond a singer’s intelligence to realize that a beefy mezzo-forte is out of place and destructive of the music’s atmosphere. I once heard Waltraud Meier sing these movements with a plangent intensity that drew oceans of meaning from the words and the music. What Podles gave us instead was some luxury vocalization, and that is not enough.

Elsewhere in the symphony, the sheer terror implicit in the moments evocative of the god Pan fell perhaps slightly short in comparison with one or two performances I have heard over the years–the big hurtling chords seemed clear-eyed rather than apprehensive in the face of cosmic power. But everything else was beautifully delineated, from the rumbustious exuberance of the “Summer marches in” first movement and the grace of the meadow flowers in the second to the last movement’s sheer quasi-religious fervor. In the second movement, the forest creatures were delightfully perky, and David Gordon played his long-drawn, shimmering offstage solo, redolent of high summer in the deep woodland, quite magically, using a rotary-valve German-style trumpet rather than the  posthorn Mahler specified, but giving it just the right degree of added vibrato. Altogether, then, an evening to treasure, and a worthy ending to a season of high accomplishment.

 

Bernard Jacobson