Raw Emotion From Berlin & Beyond
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BERLIN — Once ignored and even reviled by critics and audiences, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) have established themselves in the standard repertoire. And now they are inspiring a new generation of composers.
The Berlin Philharmonic’s three-concert series Mahler and the Music of Our Time, which kicked off this week, pairs the composer’s late symphonies with new works by living composers and suggests a dialogue between the music of the early 20th and 21st centuries. A modified version of the concerts will be presented in November at Carnegie Hall as part of the Berlin in Lights Festival.
For music scholars, the presentation offers a welcome chance to explore variety in the composer’s work. “Mahler is like a supermarket,” a professor at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler Music Academy, Dr. Mathias Hansen, said of the composer’s influence from the mid-20th century up until the present day. “You can go around and take what you want,” he continued. “Romantic feelings. Expressive feelings. There’s nothing that you can’t find in Mahler.”
Mahler’s late symphonies bring the German Romantic era in music to a close. Taken together, the Ninth Symphony, the symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, and the unfinished Tenth Symphony have a swansong-like quality. But Mahler himself said goodbye too quickly. All three works were left unperformed during the composer’s lifetime.
In addition to their motif of farewell, Mahler’s final works also pave the way for the radically new sounds of Modernism. Much of Mahler’s technique anticipated musical developments in the 20th century, a Columbia University professor, Walter Frisch, said in a telephone conversation.
Mr. Frisch cited the presence of offstage instruments as Mahler’s way of “breaking down the fourth wall of the concert hall.”
“It puts the music with the listener and displaces it in ways that change the listening experience.” This spatial exploration of sound, he said, anticipates Ives and Varèse.
Mahler also massages various musical ideas together while managing to retain diversity and discontinuity. “He brings disparate sound materials together in a work, juxtaposing folk melodies and klezmer-like tunes with Romantic melodies and gestures. There’s no attempt to smooth them over. It’s just juxtaposition and confrontation.”
In this respect, Mahler has been taken to prefigure postmodernism.
Mr. Frisch echoed Mr. Hansen in pointing to the great variety of Mahler’s work — and, in particular, its raw emotionalism — as a source of inspiration to modern and contemporary composers. “There’s a powerful, troubled personality willing to share his anguish and pain and joy. This music has an honesty and authenticity that speaks to us today. It’s both sonically interesting and speaks to the gut.”
Many of these aspects of Mahler’s works were ignored at the Berlin Philharmonic, however, during the long tenure of Herbert von Karajan, who treated Mahler as a typical late Romantic composer. Karajan’s successors, Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle, have emphasized Mahler’s modern qualities and finessed the Berlin Philharmonic into one of the world’s leading Mahler orchestras.
In the opening concert of the series on Thursday — a sold-out concert of the Ninth prefaced by a work from the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg — Sir Simon took an Apollonian and exacting approach to the Mahler. Conducting the score by heart, Sir Simon and the orchestra seemed to be working at a level of feverish intensity. It made for a performance that was both emotionally involved and intellectually incisive.
That combination of brains and heart was also present in Lindberg’s “Seht die Sonne,” which is scored for nearly the same orchestra as the Ninth. But unlike the Ninth, Mr. Lindberg’s 20-minutelong work is surprisingly bright.
“Seht die Sonne” features a Mahlerian handling of the orchestra, especially in the soloistic treatment of the instruments and in the layers of melody fragments that constantly pile on top of each other. Further evoking a Mahlerian soundscape, the composer keeps everything in a constant state of tension and flux.
Mr. Lindberg said he is inspired by Mahler’s ability to stretch the limits of the orchestra. “Mahler took the orchestra to the most extreme,” Mr. Lindberg said backstage during intermission.
Mr. Lindberg says that the older he gets, the closer he edges to the late Romantics in exploring the possibilities of the symphony orchestra. “There’s still so much to be done with the classical orchestra. Much more than was attempted after Mahler.”