SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Internet MusicWeb

Mahler: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Lauren Flanigan, Jane Eaglen, and Jane Giering-De Haan, sopranos, Nancy Maultsby and Jane Gilbert, altos, Vinson Cole, tenor, Clayton Brainerd, bass-baritone, Harold Wilson, bass, Northwest Boychoir, Seattle Pro Musica, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 25.9.2008 (BJ)


Back in the mid-1960s, when I was living in New York, Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in New York’s Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall. Sitting on the middle aisle, I suddenly found my ears assailed, at a crucial moment in the symphony, by the vehement sounds of an the offstage  brass group, which had progressed down the aisle and opened fire just a couple of feet away from my right ear.

Gerard Schwarz, known at that time simply as the greatest trumpet-player in living memory, was a member of that valiant band, and lustily indeed he blew. Now, more than four decades later, he took his turn on the Seattle Symphony’s podium to conduct the Mahler Eighth for the first time. The week’s performances were dedicated, a flyer in the program told us, “to the many thousands of people who contributed to both the creation of Benaroya Hall and its monumental impact on our great city.” In those terms, certainly, this first subscription concert of the season was a triumph.

Never, in my few live experiences of this gigantic work, have all its multifarious textural strands emerged with such clarity and impact. It was hard to know which to admire more: Mahler’s skill in creating an edifice of sound at once massive and lucid, or music director Gerard Schwarz’s in realizing both the massiveness and the lucidity. But either way, the result was a ringing endorsement of the hall’s acoustic excellence.

In the last few years Schwarz has brought Mahler’s bigger symphonies before his public at the rate of one a season–since 2006 we have heard the Third, the Seventh, and the Sixth. The vividness of the composer’s inspiration has benefitted, on each occasion, from the conductor’s equally vivid sympathy for the expressive fervor of the music and his ability to shape its often wildly varied elements into a coherent whole.

The Eighth–popularly known on account of the huge performing apparatus it calls for as the “Symphony of a Thousand”–poses a different structural problem. Its two movements are settings respectively of the hymn Veni, creator spiritus and the final scene of Goethe’s Faust. At first blush, the emotional but disciplined 9th-century Latin text of the first movement might not seem a natural companion to Goethe’s rather preposterously orotund celebration of such concepts as “the Ineffable” and “the Eternal Feminine.” (I know this is a shocking thing to say, but for all his fabled intellect and supposed philosophical depth, Goethe seems to me nowhere near as great a poet as Schiller.) Mahler, who believed–in explicit contrast to Sibelius’s rigorously logical treatment of symphonic form–that a symphony should, like the world, contain everything, often including the kitchen sink, succeeded brilliantly in unifying his treatment of the two vastly different texts, but at the cost of variety. The seven-note figure that dominates the hour-long second movement is exploited far more repetitively than its potential justifies, and the attempt to freshen the material by occasionally shortening or lengthening a note here and there falls short of disguising the sameness of the repetitions. The method, moreover, by which Mahler stretches a few motifs over his vast canvas is not development so much as permutation: the first movement’s obsessive juggling with a handful of melodic ideas, in particular, reveals where Schoenberg’s ultimately mechanistic 12-tone serial technique had its origins.

The performance Schwarz led on this occasion was distinguished by superb orchestral work, a wealth of choral power and delicacy from the Seattle Symphony Chorale, the Seattle Pro Musica, and the Northwest Boychoir, and eloquent solos from the eight well-matched vocal soloists, all underpinned by Joseph Adam’s strong yet never obtrusive contribution at the organ. Schwarz kept everything under seemingly effortless control. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to bring the first movement, which often too vividly outshines what follows, and the intermittently tedious second into an unusually effective and often magically atmospheric balance.

For a few minutes, indeed, during the quiet orchestral introduction to the Goethe setting, I was almost convinced that Mahler’s grasp had indeed fully realized his gargantuan reach. But then that seven-note figure came emphatically home to roost, and the sublime gave place to the banal. The concluding affirmation attempts something similar to the grandiose peroration of the Second Symphony, yet comes nowhere near the sheer majesty of the earlier effort. In purely physical terms, even when performed by a mere 400-plus musicians instead of that legendary “Thousand,” No. 8 is the biggest symphony the composer ever wrote. But comparing it with the weirdly magical inspirations of its immediate predecessor, or with the heart-wrenching invention of its successor, this listener finds it a relatively unsuccessful piece.

Bernard Jacobson

Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page