Mahler 9
I don't think I can say very many unintuitive things about the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle, and Mahler's Ninth Symphony. This was Tuesday night in Carnegie Hall, and for me another worthwhile jaunt down the Metro North.
Time stopped in the last movement of this symphony. I don't think I've heard an orchestra performance that generated the same trance. Rattle, after the first movement, had stepped off the podium to respectfully implore the audience (which had actually been fairly well-behaved) to maintain complete silence; I thought this was a little much at the time, but during the last movement the gesture was obviously paying off. As the final, sublimated music finished dissolving, faint impressions of traffic noise were encroaching on the silent hall. A muted ambulance siren picked up as the last melodic strains dissipated, a quiet tendril reaching in from our time and place; Rattle held the orchestra in place while that sound, too, faded, and for another few seconds of complete stillness after.
Afterwards I avoided the subway and chose to walk to Grand Central in the cool evening, in a bit of a temporally disconnected daze. Back at the station I learned that I had about three Earth-minutes to get onto a train. (I'd also stopped in a deli to pick up my traditional post-concert-jaunt roast beef sandwich, for the Metro North ride home. I had my feet on the ground enough to realize that I was incredibly hungry.)
When I woke up this morning I was still kind of in this daze; Wow, I thought, Mahler hangover. It persisted until lunch, when a pleasant conversation with a coworker finally re-extroverted my train of thought.
Mahler 9 is, I feel, one of the few-and-far-between meaningful spiritual experiences you can have as an agnostic person. The last movement, ardently coming in after fifty minutes of disjointed, anguished, and sardonic music, is so different from everything you've heard that it feels like the piece is stepping outside of itself to offer a consolation. (Beethoven's 9th does a similar thing very explicitly in its last movement, with the "O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne" announcement.) And then the question becomes whether that consolation will survive to the end of the piece and turn out to be a true comfort or not; instead of providing an answer (like the Ode to Joy does) Mahler vaporizes the music, so exquisitely slowly, and by the end it's clear that there's no more of an answer in this music than there is in looking at the stars in the sky.
I don't think this inheres to the symphony, but it's what I get out of it, and I'm glad I get this out of it.
The Berlin Philharmonic, I probably don't need to say, is just really, really good. You hear it in the solo playing and in the sectional playing too, especially in the disjointed parts of Mahler 9 (especially well-done in the first movement) where different voices need to tug painfully against each other but still remain aligned with the overall flow of the piece.
They also gave the US premiere of a new Magnus Lindberg piece, Seht die Sonne, which was 25 minutes long, endlessly inventive, gleaming like glass and steel architecture, cold, and emotionally nearly empty. Stylistically it's not far off from Salonen's recent work, though more attentive to detail work and favoring more abstracted melodies and a less continuous dramatic contour. The writing for winds is extremely good -- Lindberg knows his instrumental acoustic properties, and can alloy a winds & brass sound that makes most 20th-century symphonic wind writing seem naive in retrospect.
Kept me from pulling my hair out over the Steelers game, too; maybe better just to read the final score first off, while exiting the upper reaches of Carnegie Hall in a crush of people, having asked Nate to text it to my phone.
Time stopped in the last movement of this symphony. I don't think I've heard an orchestra performance that generated the same trance. Rattle, after the first movement, had stepped off the podium to respectfully implore the audience (which had actually been fairly well-behaved) to maintain complete silence; I thought this was a little much at the time, but during the last movement the gesture was obviously paying off. As the final, sublimated music finished dissolving, faint impressions of traffic noise were encroaching on the silent hall. A muted ambulance siren picked up as the last melodic strains dissipated, a quiet tendril reaching in from our time and place; Rattle held the orchestra in place while that sound, too, faded, and for another few seconds of complete stillness after.
Afterwards I avoided the subway and chose to walk to Grand Central in the cool evening, in a bit of a temporally disconnected daze. Back at the station I learned that I had about three Earth-minutes to get onto a train. (I'd also stopped in a deli to pick up my traditional post-concert-jaunt roast beef sandwich, for the Metro North ride home. I had my feet on the ground enough to realize that I was incredibly hungry.)
When I woke up this morning I was still kind of in this daze; Wow, I thought, Mahler hangover. It persisted until lunch, when a pleasant conversation with a coworker finally re-extroverted my train of thought.
Mahler 9 is, I feel, one of the few-and-far-between meaningful spiritual experiences you can have as an agnostic person. The last movement, ardently coming in after fifty minutes of disjointed, anguished, and sardonic music, is so different from everything you've heard that it feels like the piece is stepping outside of itself to offer a consolation. (Beethoven's 9th does a similar thing very explicitly in its last movement, with the "O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne" announcement.) And then the question becomes whether that consolation will survive to the end of the piece and turn out to be a true comfort or not; instead of providing an answer (like the Ode to Joy does) Mahler vaporizes the music, so exquisitely slowly, and by the end it's clear that there's no more of an answer in this music than there is in looking at the stars in the sky.
I don't think this inheres to the symphony, but it's what I get out of it, and I'm glad I get this out of it.
The Berlin Philharmonic, I probably don't need to say, is just really, really good. You hear it in the solo playing and in the sectional playing too, especially in the disjointed parts of Mahler 9 (especially well-done in the first movement) where different voices need to tug painfully against each other but still remain aligned with the overall flow of the piece.
They also gave the US premiere of a new Magnus Lindberg piece, Seht die Sonne, which was 25 minutes long, endlessly inventive, gleaming like glass and steel architecture, cold, and emotionally nearly empty. Stylistically it's not far off from Salonen's recent work, though more attentive to detail work and favoring more abstracted melodies and a less continuous dramatic contour. The writing for winds is extremely good -- Lindberg knows his instrumental acoustic properties, and can alloy a winds & brass sound that makes most 20th-century symphonic wind writing seem naive in retrospect.
* * * * *
Kept me from pulling my hair out over the Steelers game, too; maybe better just to read the final score first off, while exiting the upper reaches of Carnegie Hall in a crush of people, having asked Nate to text it to my phone.
1 Comments:
I agree on all accounts. Mahler's 9th is one of the great achievements of Western culture.
My impression of the Berlin Philharmonic when I saw them play several times, back over the summer, and I may have mentioned it then, was that they were just flat out better than any other orchestra (except for Vienna, maybe) that I had ever heard in live concert, on all fronts.
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