MAHLER PLUS
VSO celebration combines composers’s works with musical snapshots of his world.
One of the overarching themes of Bramwell Tovey’s stewardship of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra has been his commitment to the music of Gustav Mahler ( 1860– 1911), the greatest conductor of his age as well as its most important symphonist.
The VSO offers a rather exceptional Mahler Plus celebration this weekend, a snapshot of Mahler and selected aspects of his musical world, which runs in and around the Orpheum. There’s chamber music, lieder, and an entirely unexpected showcase of Viennese light music, before a grand finale performance of Mahler’s rafter-shaking Second Symphony, The Resurrection.
Mahler’s huge, complex symphonies form a bridge from late romanticism to expressionism, or, if you prefer, they link Wagner and Schoenberg.
During the first half of the 20th century Mahler’s works were rarely programmed, yet never forgotten; composers as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, and Dmitri Shostakovich found in Mahler a path to their musical expression. After the 1960 Mahler centennial, with the help of that great Mahler popularizer Leonard Bernstein, things took off.
It once was that any Mahler performance was a red- letter day on the Vancouver musical calendar; now we’ve heard readings of more or less everything, including such hard to schedule works as the song- symphony Das Lied von der Erde and the blockbuster Eighth Symphony ( called, with considerable reason, the Symphony of a Thousand).
The Mahler Plus idea is different: assemble a sampler of Mahler works and flank them with germane glimpses of the musical culture of Vienna ( and, in two instances, beyond) which demonstrate Mahler backstories and influence.
It starts in the new Orpheum Annex. The first program, chamber music with some songs, sets the open tone of the endeavour. There’s music for quintet by Anton Bruckner, Mahler’s fellow Late Romantic symphonist.
There’s Mahler’s early Piano Quartet, a great example of a road not taken that makes you ponder his decision to specialize in orchestral music.
Arnold Schoenberg’s work is usually considered box office poison. He looked to Mahler the way Mahler looked to Bruckner, as an unofficial musical father figure and an informal mentor, but decidedly not a teacher. Schoenberg had a musical sweet tooth, and notched some spiffy arrangements of works by other composers. One of the most charming of these ends Friday’s program: Johann Strauss à la Schoenberg, in a chamber version of The Emperor Waltz.
The fin de siècle Vienna theme continues Saturday at the Orpheum with a program of light music from all the usual suspects: all manner of Strausses, von Suppé, and Lehar, as well as Brahms and Mahler ( the usually excised Blumine movement from the First Symphony). It all makes considerable sense: Mahler’s world encompassed the sweet and the sentimental as well as the dark and disturbing, and his work can combine both in almost the same breath.
There’s a telling anecdote about Mahler and his sometime- composer wife Alma, two musical snobs if ever there were, trying to remember a popular tune of the day. In a music emporium they took hold of the sheet music and memorized the piece on the spot for later, private enjoyment: heaven forbid that Herr Direktor Mahler and Frau Mahler should be seen buying such a trifle.
It’s back to the Annex for Mahler’s