Saturday 8 April 2017

The Nine Numbers Game

Is there really a jinx on composers who attempt to write a tenth symphony?  Of course not -- you just have to look at Mozart (41) and Haydn (104) to prove that!  

But Gustav Mahler certainly believed that there was a jinx -- and his own slowly failing health probably helped to reinforce that belief.  Of course, he knew the precedent of Beethoven -- and, more recently, of Bruckner who left his Ninth unfinished at his death.  Mahler even went so far as to call his ninth major symphonic work a "song-symphony" (which it was -- Das Lied von der Erde) and to leave it unnumbered.

So, strictly speaking, Mahler's Ninth is actually his tenth, and this work which he mainly wrote in 1910 and was struggling to complete when he died in 1911 would really have been his eleventh.  After Mahler died, his widow, Alma, approached several different composers to complete the work, but none would take on the task.  But the sketches and drafts were published in facsimile.

Fast forward to the 1950s when British musicologist Deryck Cooke took up the project.  His version was first performed (incomplete) on the BBC in 1960, and he continued to revise and improve it through two subsequent publications.  At first, Alma Mahler was unwilling to allow performances but after hearing the recording of that first radio performance, she changed her mind and gave her blessing to Cooke's completion.  That decision may have caused her some angst, because the drafts and sketches of the symphony contain many margin notes relating to Mahler's discovery that she was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.

In justifying his work, Deryck Cooke famously stated that the manuscripts and orchestral drafts together constituted not a "might-have-been" but an "almost-is."  Unlike some of the "completions" of various other works attempted by musicologists in the years since, Cooke worked from an orchestral draft score on 4 staves with indications of instrumentation written in -- which covered about 4/5 of the symphony -- and from sketches.  He stated that his objective was to allow the musical world to hear the work in the state in which Mahler left it -- keeping clearly in mind that Mahler would undoubtedly have done much revising and rescoring if he had lived longer.

Many great Mahler conductors have chosen not to perform the Tenth, holding that it is not a genuine Mahler work.  Fair enough -- if you're really particular.  Personally, I feel that what Deryck Cooke has achieved is a remarkably authentic and believably Mahlerian completion of the symphony.  It was the latest version of Cooke's edition which we heard in this concert.

Under guest conductor Thomas Dausgaard, the Toronto Symphony gave a hair-raising performance of this extraordinary composition.  The intense tone of the performance was set right at the beginning with a very quiet, slow, but not tentative, traversal of the long, wandering viola theme.

Dausgaard certainly grasped the unique feature of this first movement, that blocks of music in three different tempi are juxtaposed with no transitions between them.  This almost Bruckner-like procedure is rare in other Mahler works, but it's of the essence here.  If some of the pauses between sections were perhaps a tad lengthy, no harm was done as the audience stayed right with the artists.  Dausgaard also relished the clashes between melodies in one key and accompanying chords in one or more other keys.  The entire movement built purposefully to the shattering climax, a nine-note discord capped by a loud scream of anguish on the trumpet -- a scream which is held through the otherwise silent beat between repetitions of that massive discord.  The slow conclusion died convincingly away.

The acid test of any conductor who tackles this score is the second movement, the first of two scherzos.  There's almost nothing like it in all of music.  This fiendish scherzo has a strong rhythmic drive but the basic rhythm and time signature are frequently altered, sometimes as often as every bar!  Dausgaard hit the ground running here, and then achieved a good contrast with the lolloping ländler of the trio section, the one part that does stick to a single clear tempo.  The closing pages accelerated to such a degree that some of the players had trouble keeping up.

Why did Mahler call the short third movement "Purgatorio"?  It's barely four minutes long, the shortest symphonic movement he ever composed, and most of it is notably quiet.  But this is where the marginal inscriptions begin to appear in the drafts and sketches, and it's pretty clear what the purgatory was that the composer was enduring.  Musically, it's critical to get this little movement right because it's a frequent point of reference in the remaining two movements and its themes reappear several times.  Dausgaard took the main theme at a suitably restless but not over-fast tempo.  The two cries of anguish later in the piece were kept under control, as this is not and must not be the crisis point of the entire symphony.

The second scherzo stays much closer to a fixed 3/4 tempo, in the manner of the Austrian ländler which Mahler so loved to use, but the free use of dissonant chords savagely undercuts that tradition.  One of the margin notes here carries a revealing comment: "The devil dances it with me!"  Dausgaard and the orchestra certainly brought out that demonic quality in the music.  Again, there are two anguished climaxes -- passages which the orchestra hammered home with utmost force -- and here the margin notes read "To live for you!  To die for you!"  The movement eventually dies away, and here both players and conductor created the convincing impression of the music fading into the air like a disappearing ghost or a vanishing nightmare (this second scherzo is nothing if not nightmarish).

Dausgaard wisely decided to move straight ahead into the long finale, in which case he could suitably have deleted one of the great drum strokes.  Minor detail -- the long slow introduction, the last and slowest of Mahler's funeral marches, pushed remorselessly forward to the moment when the orchestra launches into a faster tempo.  Although this rapid central section began firmly enough, things began to come a bit unstuck during the closing pages as Dausgaard kept pushing harder -- which he didn't really need to do.  The music's quite powerful enough without that.

No criticism of the even bigger repeat eruption of the first movement's nine-note discord, nor of the trumpet's even longer sustained note -- and the powerful horn statement of the opening viola solo was impressive indeed.

In the long final slow section, Dausgaard and the orchestra found the right middle course of a wise acceptance of fate without the heavenly blessedness of the second, third, and eighth symphonies.

Just as the music seems to be dying away, the strings rear up one last time in a massive unison leap upwards followed by a descending melody which softens as it falls.  This is the spot on the draft where Mahler wrote in the margin, "Almschi!" (his diminutive name for Alma).  For a moment my eyes grew moist.

At one time, conductors and orchestras felt that a Mahler symphony was quite enough for an audience to digest in a single concert!  Times have changed, and we got two shorter works before the main event.

All through this season, the Toronto Symphony has been presenting a long series of works commissioned from Canadian composers in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary.  Believe it or not, this was the first time I heard one of them!  At every other concert I've attended the new commission had been performed on the night when I wasn't there!

Hopewell Cape by Christine Donkin proved to be a short but energetic tone poem, melding a lively rhythmic profile with an intriguing use of unrelated common chords somewhat reminiscent of Nielsen.

After this work, principal cellist Joseph Johnson took the stage in the Cello Concerto in A Minor, Op. 129 by Robert Schumann.  This is one of the most unusual concerto works for any instrument in the repertoire, since it largely eschews virtuoso display in favour of a more lyrical approach.  As well, it's one of Schumann's last and most successful attempts at building a multi-movement work into a single uninterrupted and coherent unit.  Another unusual feature, in the first movement, is the way that cello and orchestra each have their own melodic material, but with almost no overlap or crossover.

Using a moderate-sized orchestra, Dausgaard led a reading in a suitably small and lightweight scale, thus allowing the soloist to play with restraint as well.  This concerto would be a disaster if you tried to play it like Brahms or (worse yet) Liszt!  I felt, though, that Johnson's performance, although technically strong, lacked any sense of energy or life.  Somehow, it ended up feeling like a competent read-through at a rehearsal but not much more than that.

A final note: for this concert, the conductor chose to seat the orchestra's strings in a most unusual pattern.  The first and second violins were placed respectively to the left and right of the conductor (a common European practice, especially in Mahler's day) but the basses and cellos were also moved to sit right by the first violins, with the violas next to the second violins.  Since I always sit on the audience left in the hall, I was quite startled to find myself looking at the basses and cellos at such close quarters -- they're normally all the way on the far side of the stage.

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