At ease with “The Song of the Earth”
Conductor Alan Gilbert
last movement to Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (“The Song of the Earth”) is notorious. A minefield for conductors, it’s about 30 minutes long and can easily spin out of control with its stripped-down, almost naked orchestration. Its long-noted melodies are as bewitching as they are dicey to execute. Passing through the orchestra, they’re often slightly out of sync, and Mahler’s score calls for them to be played at slow tempos in a confounding variety of meters — often simultaneously.
“Do you know how to conduct this?” Mahler, also a conductor, once asked his protégé Bruno Walter. “Because I certainly don’t.”
Alan Gilbert, who will conduct “Das Lied” as part of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival on Monday, Aug. 13, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, laughed at the anecdote. Artist-in-residence for the 2018 festival, Gilbert said that final movement “never fails to kill me. It’s such a powerful, unbelievably transformative experience.” Paradoxically, he waxed over this highly metaphysical work while speaking by phone from a grocery store near his home outside Stockholm, Sweden, while shopping for dinner for his children. He planned to make chicken fricassee for his son Esra — born 13 summers ago in Santa Fe while Gilbert was music director of the Santa Fe Opera — and a vegetarian stir-fry for his fourteenyear-old daughter Noemi, he explained. And then he went back to his discussion of that closing movement, titled “Der Abschied,” or “The Farewell.”
Its “rhythms are so free and there’s something so improvisatory and spontaneous about it,” he said. No one, not even Mahler — famous for filling his scores with specific instructions — can spell out every detail in a musical performance: “The idea that you can write everything down in music and with traditional musical notation is completely misguided,” Gilbert continued. “So the key is to have a strong enough feeling about how it goes, how it should sound and I feel, and then somehow you find a way to make it work.” Beyond that, all six songs of “Das Lied” — it’s essentially an hourlong symphony for two vocal soloists and orchestra — are “amazingly human and telling and personal and moving and meaningful; it’s a wonderful song cycle. There’s something exotic, I guess, about the choice of text” — ancient Chinese verse, translated into German — “and I’m sure he was trying to explore sort of a mysterious unfamiliar territory. But it really is about universal themes: love, loss, death, our motivation for living, the pursuit of happiness, and even the enjoyment of sadness. It’s
Mahler stuff.” Mahler composed most of his song cycle in 1908, a year after he had suffered three blows. One was the loss of his conducting position at the Vienna Court Opera as a result of backroom politics, inevitably laced with anti-Semitism. Another was the death of his daughter Maria from scarlet fever and diphtheria. Finally, there was the shock of learning that he suffered from a congenital heart defect.
“With one stroke,” he confessed to Walter, his protégé and good friend, “I have lost everything … and have to learn my first steps again like a newborn.” No one could turn tragedy into transcendence like Mahler, and “Das Lied” may be his most personal creation.
In Santa Fe, Gilbert will conduct a chamber version of the song cycle, designed for salon-style performances by Arnold Schoenberg, who started work on the reduction in 1920. (Working from Schoenberg’s notes, German composer Rainer Riehn finished the chamber version in 1983.) With any Mahler performance, striking a balance between heightened emotion and clarity of detail can be difficult. Here, the reduced forces make that balance more attainable: “The bigger version for orchestra” is filled with passages that “are so enormous and heavily orchestrated that it’s a constant challenge to keep the orchestra at a volume where the singers can be heard,” Gilbert said. “But with this chamber version, I know the singers appreciate not having to scream their heads off. And I actually don’t think you lose musical quality. It’s still incredibly touching.”
Gilbert, who spent eight seasons as the New York Philharmonic’s music director — he left the position in 2017 — will have considerable help at the Lensic. He will lead an ensemble with two top-tier soloists, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Paul Groves, and 15 instrumentalists, including Gilbert’s sister Jennifer Gilbert, a violinist who serves as concertmaster of the Orchestre National de Lyon. His wife, cellist Kajsa William-Olsson — a member of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Gilbert was principal conductor from 2000 to 2008 — will perform in several festival programs, including two featuring her husband as an instrumentalist. Accomplished as a violinist, Gilbert will join in a performance of J.S. Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for Violin and Oboe, BWV 1060 (Saturday, Aug. 11, at the Lensic).