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Mahler Lied, No One Died.
MTT's conducting of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is so good, it should be recorded and kept for the posterity. But wait! It was! The series, which concludes tonight, will be taped and processed, and included in the Mahler recording cycle, the on-going endeavor to put all of Mahler's symphonic work onto a CD.
MTT's take on Mahler, a forcefully engaged and expressive rendition, has been observed here quite a few times. We expect to be blown away by the orchestra. We actually demand it. But the surprise came from Thomas Hampson. Das Lied von der Erde is written for two singers, a baritone and a tenor. The tenor, Stuart Skelton, did not impress us as much. Our companion on Wednesday night, SFist Rita, liked him because she found him endearing, being drunk all the time. And truth be told, out of the three songs Skelton did, one is the "Drinking Song of the Earth's Sorrow" and another "the Drunkard in Spring." Skelton was the most comfortable in the last one, "Of Youth" where he could display a more melodic tone in a folk-ish tune. As a drunk, he came off as wobbly and overmatched by the orchestra. He did have the drunkard body language pinned down, though, turning the pages of his sheet music like he was throwing a punch, with a don't-mess-with-me game face that had us wondering how comfortable he was up there, and how immersed in the music he was.
Post title totally stolen from rroseselavy's comment here. Picture of Thomas Hampson.
One could blame the recording for his rather muted performance: he could have been singing to the mike rather than the audience, hoping that the imbalance of sounds that we heard could be fixed in the post-processing phase. Hopefully he looked and listened across the podium to Hampson, who was delivering a lecture on how to sing Mahler. First, Hampson did not need the score. Impassible in between the songs, his face would liven up at his cue, and he would become part of the musical world he described. He gave the definitive performance: lyrical and powerful at the same time, in total command, yet full of sentiments.
His performance was equaled by MTT's conducting, who provided a textured sonic backgrounds to the haiku-like Chinese poems set in music by Mahler. MTT has an affinity for Mahler's idioms, and he highlighted some recurring motifs, some typical riffs with grace. European composers were discovering Chinese modal music at the turn of the century (see Ravel last week for another illustration a couple years before Mahler) and MTT had fun spelling out those exotic scales. In the orchestral interlude during the last piece, he created an eerie atmosphere, slightly off kilt, with a harp ostinato, or beautiful solos for the flute (a magnificent Tim Day) and oboe (William Bennett). When layers of instruments snow balled onto the pared interlude opening, the sound later turned into a thick fabric, which had us think of hot magma bubbling out a pit. As always in Mahler, MTT cranked the intensity knob to the max: he does not play this stuff half-assed.
While this take works perfect for Mahler, we are a bit more circumspect about it for the Mozart Symphony which preceded it. It's in C major, and if you asked us to write a C major symphony, we would start it with a C major chord, then a C in unison for all the orchestra, then we would go to the dominant for a little scale going up, which we would end with a C major arpeggio. We would do something like that because it's trivial, and we can't write music anyway. Mozart actually starts his 34th symphony this way. Of course, Mozart knows it's trite, we surmise he's playing some kind of joke, yet MTT played it like it was meaningful. So we got this tormented, agitated rendition of the symphony with a thick, Mahlerian sound. As an interpretation of Mozart it left us wanting. But as a warm up for the recording, it got the orchestra ready all right. And that's what matters, after all.