While rummaging through the Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives one day (or so we’re told), Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel came across a bumper sticker from the 1970s that read, “Mahler Grooves.” The decal was from the Mahler Society of Los Angeles, which holds annual Mahlerthons, where people listen to recordings of the composer’s symphonies all day and night. (Full disclosure: Current Mahlerthons are programmed by this author.)
Discovering this souvenir gave Dudamel an idea for a festival, a successor to his “crazy” (his word) Mahler Project from 2012, in which he conducted all nine completed Mahler symphonies, plus the Adagio from the Tenth and Songs of A Wayfarer, with two orchestras over a span of 24 days. Unlike then, the Mahler Grooves festival, which opened this past weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall with movements from the composer’s first and last symphonies and a selection of songs, has a more modest agenda.
There seemed to be a didactic purpose to the concert on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 23. First, the orchestra ventured to present the First Symphony’s discarded “Blumine” movement as a self-contained work. This is becoming a common practice as more and more conductors discover the piece’s delicate, nostalgic charms. With principal trumpeter Thomas Hooten delivering a smooth, silky solo, Dudamel set a rather quick pace, free of excess sentiment yet ardent in the right spots.
From early Mahler, Dudamel then leapt ahead in time to the Adagio from the Tenth, showing how far Mahler had progressed — right up to the point where some composers were about to cross over into atonality. This movement remains the only part of the Symphony No. 10 that Dudamel will perform — which is our loss because he would be an outstanding advocate of one of the performing versions of the entire work (such as Deryck Cooke’s). Nevertheless, Dudamel did the Adagio well at a middle-of-the-road pace and with his usual meticulous attention to detail. The horror-struck peek into the abyss of atonality made its impact, and the coda was sensitively played. The brasses could have been toned down a bit, their sound overbalancing the strings at times.
The concert’s second half featured 11 orchestrated songs, but not in the usual groupings. Typically, when the songs from the folklore collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The youth’s magic horn) come up for performance, a conductor will program 12 or 13 selections in no particular order. Dudamel chose to go his own enterprising way, choosing seven of the songs and adding four more from Lieder und Gesänge, a song collection dating from 1880 to 1889 and originally written for male voice and piano. The LA Phil played them here in lavishly orchestrated versions by the Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio. This makes an interesting contradiction: Dudamel won’t perform Mahler’s Tenth in any completed version, but he will play Mahler a la Berio.
And yes, there’s a difference in texture and sound between Mahler’s and Berio’s orchestrations — sometimes a big difference. Mahler’s are sparer, sharper, and more transparent than Berio’s dense, big-thinking notions.
Indeed, Berio’s grandiose vision of “Scheiden und Meiden” (Parting and separation) was played so loudly on Sunday that the LA Phil drowned out the estimable British baritone Simon Keenlyside. “Hans und Grethe,” one of Mahler’s earliest songs, receives an oddly lush, almost Richard Strauss-like treatment from Berio, and “Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald” (I walked joyfully through a green wood) also has a thick texture. Yet Berio did lay off the heavy stuff in “Ablösung im Sommer” (Change in summer), possibly to avoid comparison with an instrumental version of the same song that opens the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.
Keenlyside and Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova took turns in the songs, with Keenlyside handling all of the Lieder und Gesänge material and Gubanova five of the seven Wunderhorn songs. Gubanova’s voice, with its rapid vibrato and trace of a cutting Slavic tone quality, bloomed most fully in “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” (Where the beautiful trumpets blow) as Dudamel’s attention to nuance and detail in the orchestrations paid off handsomely. Keenlyside’s best moments came in the vintage Mahler funeral march “Revelge,” a performance full of bravado, lyrical feeling, and tough rhythms from the band.
Whatever one might think of Berio’s veering away from the Mahler sound, this was a well-performed set of fascinating, beautiful, out-of-the-way songs, closing neatly with the subdued benediction of “Urlicht” (Primal light) — later used in the Symphony No. 2.
