Songs of the Earth festival merges East and West
The events leading up to Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (”The Song of the Earth”) sound lifted straight from the Book of Job. In the space of a single summer, that of 1907, antisemitic politics forced him out of his position at the Vienna Court Opera; his 4-year-old daughter Maria died after battling diphtheria and scarlet fever; and his doctors found a congenital heart defect.
From those setbacks arose one of the most stunning, transcendent works in Mahler’s entire catalog. A symphony in all but name — he refrained from calling it as such to avoid the ill fortune that supposedly befell composers who surpassed Beethoven’s count — “Das Lied von der Erde” confronts mortality by reveling in nature, as expressed through mezzo-soprano and tenor voices. For the text, Mahler turned to “The Chinese Flute,” a volume of Tang dynasty verse as paraphrased by German poet Hans Bethge.
“This is one of the instances where really knowing what he was going through when he wrote it, you can’t help but connect to it in a special way,” says Rebecca Zabinski, Houston Symphony’s director of artistic planning.
“He just sort of leads you through this journey,” she adds. “All of Mahler’s music is a journey, but I think the songs of Mahler, in particular, are extra special in that way.”
Featuring vocal soloists Clay Hilley (tenor) and Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano), “Das Lied von der Erde” anchors the first weekend of the Houston Symphony’s Songs of the Earth festival. Thematically linked programming like this and last month’s Riots & Scandals festival is a priority for new music director Juraj Valcuha, who here has paired the Mahler with Qigong Chen’s “Itinerary of an Illusion” (Orchestral Variations). Once imprisoned during China’s cultural revolution, Chen later won a national composition competition that allowed him to study with Olivier Messiaen in Paris, where he became the venerable French composer’s final student.
“Mahler and Chen both had to overNew come a lot of adversity, a lot of really terrible struggles,” Zabinski says. “I think that kind of shared human tragedy, and the fact that they took that tragedy and used it to produce this beautiful music, is kind of what makes his music pair with Mahler so well.”
The second weekend keys off Claude Debussy’s 1905 orchestral seascape “La Mer,” specifically the image he used on the score’s cover: the Japanese artist Hokusai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave,” which depicts in vivid Prussian blue an enormous wave swamping three boats with Mount Fuji pushed far into the background. Like many Europeans of the day, Debussy was fascinated by Japanese culture; a print of “The Great Wave” hung in his Parisian studio.
Besides “La Mer,” Valcuha has programmed two works by composers who, like Chen, mingle elements of Western classical music with sounds from their native land, in this case Japan: Toru Takemitsu’s “Quotation of Dream,” a concerto for two pianos and orchestra that appropriates and expands on motifs from “La Mer”; and Toshio Hosokawa’s “Autumn Wind,” which employs the shakuhachi vertical bamboo flute as a stand-in for a lone human — in this case, soloist Kojiro Umezaki — facing off against Mother Nature, represented by the orchestra.
“Through the musical dialog between the shakuhachi and the orchestra, the song of the human connects with nature more and more deeply,” Zabinski says.
Besides the two weekend concert series, the festival has already featured two chamber music concerts of traditional and contemporary Chinese classical music, organized by composer and Shepherd School of Music faculty member Shih-Hui Chen. Still to come is a Feb. 16 program that plays off Debussy’s fascination with Gamelan, the dynamic Indonesian percussion orchestras he discovered at the 1889 World’s Fair, by pairing the local ensemble Gamelan of the Moon with Houston Symphony musicians performing Debussy’s Gamelan-influenced String Quartet in G Minor.
On Feb. 18 at the sky atrium of Kirkland and Ellis (609 Main), a postconcert recital by Lucas and Arthur Jussen, sibling piano soloists on “Quotation of Dream,” will close out the festival with works by Debussy, Ravel and Turkish pianist-composer Fazil Say. Multifaceted culture-fluid events like Songs of the Earth could well signal where the orchestra will be headed in future seasons, Zabinski says.
“I just feel like once you start going down the rabbit hole of how all of this ties together — learning about these composers, and how they were inspired by their own culture and the culture of other countries and how it all wraps together — it’s just so fascinating, and such a reminder of how art and music is a uniting force, no matter where you’re from,” she explains. “I’ve really loved working on this and could talk about it forever.”