Youthful cantata struggles
Mahler devoted much of his conducting career to opera, becoming in particular one of the great Wagnerians of his day. Yet he never composed an opera himself, which seems paradoxical until you tumble across “Das Klagende Lied,” the youthful cantata in which he came closest to writing a musical drama.
San Francisco Symphony audiences encounter the piece more than most people, because Michael Tilson Thomas has championed it with the fervor of a true believer ever since taking the reins of the orchestra in 1995. He conducted the piece to close his first season as music director; he recorded it and then reprised it in 2001 with an even stronger cast of singers; and on Friday, Jan. 13, he introduced a semistaged version of the piece in
Davies Symphony Hall. Nothing helps. Mahler was a teenage genius when he wrote “Das Klagende Lied,” and both parts of that dual descriptor are relevant. The question is where you put the emphasis.
To listen to this hourlong, three-part narrative, based on a sort of Gothic folk tale of murder and retribution, is to be left in little doubt about the greatness that was yet to come from the pen of its creator. The orchestral writing is astonishingly assured, full of Wagnerian reminiscences and foreshadowings of the effects that would later stock Mahler’s symphonies.
In fact, a devoted Mahlerian — someone such as Thomas, or many of the San Francisco concertgoers who have learned by his example over the decades — is likely to dote on this score as we would on the baby album of a relative, delighting at the distinctive gestures and quirks that turn out to have been present from the get-go. The marches, the brass chorales, the off-stage musicians are all present and accounted for.
But Mahler, who completed the score shortly after his 20th birthday, was also wielding giant tools he hadn’t remotely begun to master. Like some overeager sorcerer’s apprentice, he unleashes great forces and then watches helplessly as they crash into one another.
Many of those orchestral set pieces, for example, create a temporary mood but don’t contribute much to the dramatic flow. The decision to distribute different bits of the narrative almost willy-nilly among the chorus and the four vocal soloists just makes things more diffuse.
And the clumsiness of the work’s dramatic architecture only emphasizes its indebtedness, especially to Wagner. When you hear the opening strains of “Götterdämmerung” out of context, or witness Mahler modeling the opening of his Part 3 on an analogous point in “The Flying Dutchman,” you long even more powerfully for the older master’s assurance.
Giving “Das Klagende Lied” a physical staging — with leadership from director James Darrash and projection designer Adam Larsen — mostly served to throw a glaring light on the work’s shortcomings.
There was superb work by the vocal soloists — particularly from mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, who got the biggest assignment, but also from her colleagues soprano Joélle Harvey, tenor Michael König and baritone Brian Mulligan. The singing of Ragnar Bohlin’s Symphony Chorus sounded as robust and fervid as I’ve heard it.
But sending the vocalists hither and yon across the stage, surrounded by a quartet of writhing dancers and a pair of lovely towheaded children, didn’t do much to relieve the cantata’s essential dramatic stiffness. Not even Thomas’ capacious, finely detailed conducting could get the proceedings moving at full pace.
There were most modest but more unalloyed pleasures during the evening’s short first half. Mahler’s winsome orchestral serenade “Blumine” was crowned by the gorgeous playing of principal trumpeter Mark Inouye, and Cooke delivered a throaty, eloquent account of the “Songs of a Wayfarer.” Now it’s time to go back to the symphonies.