Mahler — from end to beginning
It isn’t possible to encompass the entire sweep of Mahler’s symphonic output in a single evening — it’s too vast, too multifarious and of course simply too long. So Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, in this week’s revelatory concert program, did the next best thing. They gave us the endpoints of the composer’s journey, and invited us to connect the dots ourselves.
In a magnificent concert in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, March 30, Thomas and the orchestra combined Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with the Adagio from the unfinished Symphony No. 10 — the alpha and omega, more or less, of this indispensable body of work. And the evening’s profound, full-bodied performances served as yet another reminder of the miracles that these musicians can pull off, time and again, with Mahler’s music.
True, the constraints of concert planning meant that things had to begin at the end, with Mahler’s final symphonic utterance (the rest of the five-movement Tenth Symphony had been sketched out in various degrees of detail at the composer’s death in 1911, but only the work’s first movement was left in completed form) and then travel backward in time. But that seemed a small price to pay for musicianship of such grandeur and specificity.
And frankly, the retrospective shape that resulted (reminiscent, perhaps, of deathbed framing devices in movies like “Citizen Kane”) only added a note of poignancy to the proceedings. The lush, expressive pliancy of the Adagio from the Tenth — the combination of tonal fullness and transparency that Mahler was able to muster at that point in his career, or the brusque jolts from the brass and woodwinds that interrupt the flow of the music — sounded more than ever like promissory notes on stylistic advances that would never be paid.
Thomas and the orchestra showed no hesitation in mining that vein for its full emotional impact. The sinuously questing viola melody that opens the movement registered with both its uncertainty and its tenderness intact, and the sudden blossoming of the texture as the entire orchestra joins in sounded as cushioned and welcoming as I’ve ever heard it.
For the ensuing 30 minutes, Thomas kept the movement’s long, buoyant melodic lines aloft with just the gentlest nudge, like someone tapping a balloon to keep it in the air. Yet there was focus and purpose to the movement’s rhetoric as well — never more clearly than when things drew past a final repetition of the main theme and into the shimmery stillness of the movement’s close.
The First Symphony, by contrast, emerged as a bold, robust statement, almost chest-thumping in its clean lines and incisive rhythms. The nature imagery of the first movement — birds, forests, mountain hikers — sounded lightweight but strong, as if built on a titanium frame. The dance rhythms of the second movement boasted an almost aggressive urgency, tempered by the sweetness of the trio section, and the ominous tread of the slow movement — set in gorgeously understated motion by timpanist Edward Stephan and bassist Scott Pingel — soon gathered momentum and vigor without losing any of its stark clarity.
Most impressive, at the end of an exciting evening, was the disruptive force the musicians brought to the finale, a small tempest of musical crossfire and gleaming brass. When the entire horn section rose to its feet at the end, in one of the composer’s most inspired bits of orchestral choreography, the level of energy on display suddenly went to 11.