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MSO – Mahler 9

The MSO’s excellent Cycle of Mahler’s symphonies continues with the composer’s large-scale and heart-wrenching farewell to life and its torments.
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Image: Sir Andrew Davis, photo (c) Peter Tarasiuk.

An all-pervading, unequivocal sense of death, anxiety and finality characterised this concert presented by the MSO under its chief conductor Andrew Davis on Friday night.  Since 2014, a year after Davis was appointed, the orchestra has been working through all ten symphonies by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler in performance and recordings.  In the past three years I’ve heard Symphonies 5, 6 and 7 as well as Das Lied von der Erde, a work that Mahler regarded as an unnumbered symphony in song.  The project has been a highly successful undertaking.

Mahler began his Ninth Symphony, the last completed work in this form, in the Spring of 1908 and on 1 April, 1909 the work was complete.  Its first performance was by the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter on 26 June, 1912, a year after the composer’s death.  All of Mahler’s characteristic symphonic traits can be heard in the Ninth as we reel from one emotional extreme to another.  Remarkable is his almost constant obsessive agitation and anxiety, the vast expansion of form, with the first movement as long as an average Classical symphony and the use of traditional dance forms grotesquely distorted.

I have pondered, not for the first time, what this beguiling work might have represented for the composer at the abrupt conclusion of his life’s work and at the start of the twentieth century.  What might it mean for us now a whole century later?  Has anything changed?  From reading many explanations we garner clues.  The late eminent Mahlerian connoisseur and conductor Leonard Bernstein, a principal reviver of Mahler in the USA, speculated in his fifth Norton Lecture that the entire work is symbolically prophesying three kinds of death: Mahler’s own impending death, the death of tonality through the Second Viennese School, and the death of “Faustian” culture, a recognition of the vanity of human pretension, in all the arts.  This scenario may be furnished by our knowledge that in 1907 Mahler’s life had been turned upside down by four highly stressful occurrences: he resigned as artistic director of the Vienna Court Orchestra owing to internal political disputes and anti-Semitism, his four-year-old daughter Maria died of scarlet fever, his marriage to Alma Schindler was in crisis, and his own life-curtailing heart disease was first diagnosed. 

But Mahler’s anxiety may have further stemmed from being aware that he was at the end of the line holding the mantle of the Austro-German symphonic tradition established by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.  The MSO’s director of artistic planning Ronald Vermeulen wrote in the printed program on this occasion “the work continues where Der Abschied (The Farewell), the last movement of his Lied von der Erde, ends.”  Bruno Walter stated that this title Der Abschied could equally have served as the heading on the Ninth Symphony’s title page. Certainly, all four movements feel like expansive and profound farewells. On this occasion, perhaps more than ever before, I noticed the work’s many associations with and references to Mahler’s earlier symphonies, as if the Ninth is a ‘gathering up’ or summation of all that had been expressed before.  And over its four extensive movements, the gradual thinning out of its narrative became newly revealed.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor brought out many qualities of this remarkable and unique work on Friday night, though it was clear that the subsequent two performances concluding on Monday evening (19 March) will mature.  The opening Andante comodo, with its nervous shudders and shivers suffered from stage-fright in minor tuning problems.  Davis carefully avoided any suggestion of indulgence, let alone schmaltz, that sometimes is associated with the descending-tone, or by inversion ascending, motif.  The work’s cavalcade of sometimes competing narrative, tangled argument and neurotic, if not obsessive temperament was all clearly delineated and articulated under Davis’s direction that sought not to waste one skerrick of detail.  The performance housed the crazed and fragile emotional mania necessary for its shocking cadential resolutions, ranging from sheer, luminous ecstasy to crashing, utterly darkest despair.  The second movement Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb (In the measure of a relaxed rustic folk dance. Somewhat clumsy and very earthy), which is the first of two central dance movements bore out the obsession, with the clumsy Ländler starting as an innocent chirping and flirting of woodwinds then leading to its wild, ultimate and raging extremes. The difficult tempo transitions within the third movement, a true danse macabre, the sarcastic and grotesque Rondo-Burleske: Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig, were expertly realised.  With Davis extracting every last drop of essence from the deep G-stringed melodic etching in the prayer-like final farewell, this hymn-like Adagio shocked for its almost brutal exclamation of conclusiveness.

Material subsequently thins and we begin to feel uncomfortable on this lonely, desolate and unsettling sojourn.  The colossal and cushioning orchestral writing of the first movement gives way to sheerest chamber music in the last, with voices sparsely, carefully passed between solo musicians.  The minor-third arpeggiation (heard in the Adagietto of the 5th Symphony) begins again for the last time, and as falling stars we hear descending glissandos in upper strings.  Finally, we have entered another world and it feels at this stage as if Mahler has already left us, no longer responsible for the music we are hearing.  Nothing remains.

Each and every instrumental solo was finely executed, notably Dale Barltrop (concert master), Christopher Moore (principal viola), David Thomas (principal clarinet) and the energetic and confident playing throughout of guest principal timpanist, Adam Jeffrey.  The two harps strummed throughout like great lutes accompanying a John Dowland lament.

A full half-minute period of silence followed the performance before rapturous applause.

Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5

MSO – Mahler 9
Andrew Davis
Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne
Friday 16 March 2018

David Barmby
About the Author
David Barmby is former head of artistic planning of Musica Viva Australia, director of music at St James' Anglican Church, King Street, artistic administrator of Bach 2000 (Melbourne Festival), the Australian National Academy of Music and Melbourne Recital Centre.