San Francisco Symphony audiences who have grown accustomed to long-arch excursions through the Mahler symphonic canon need to adjust their sights for this week’s “Gustav Mahler: Origins and Legacies” programs at Davies Symphony Hall. As the middle panel of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas’ three-week Mahler Festival ’09, the programs amount to busily filled, prismatically constructed talk-and-play probings of the composer’s musical sources, techniques, humor, pathos, and psychology.
Tilson Thomas is aptly billed as “conductor and host.” He might also be seen as a deeply sympathetic Grand Inquisitor, intent on exploring the full “flavor and savor,” as he put it, of Mahler’s music.
Wednesday’s opening concert was a generously if somewhat haphazardly stuffed event. It included music — including a jaunty band tune and the whirringly mechanical Rocking Knapsack Polka — that the composer heard in his youth and tapped later on; a sprint of gag-filled snippets from various Mahler scherzos, as a run-up to full movements from Symphonies Nos. 7 and 9; a tender and emotionally expansive performance of Songs of a Wayfarer by Thomas Hampson; and a deft bit of tracery from the song “Ablösung im Sommer” to the third movement of Symphony No. 3. MTT also tossed in a Donizetti funeral march, for tragic good measure, in a program that stretched past the normal San Francisco Symphony concert end-time of 10 p.m.
This unorthodox but fascinating program seemed odder still due to the presence of multiple TV cameras, both manned and eerily robotic, that kept peering into, through, and down on the orchestra. The equipment was there to gather material for a future program in the Symphony’s worthy Keeping Score series for PBS. For the live audience, the restlessly roving cameras were a kind of visual analogue for Tilson Thomas’ own swooping investigations.
Summer Sing-Off
After settling on Mahler’s “sense of wonder” for his theme, MTT brought Hampson on for the “Ablösung” setting from Das Knaben Wunderhorn. Translated as “Relief in Summer,” the short song, rendered in distinctly shaded colors by the soloist, is a winsome sing-off between a cuckoo and Mrs. Nightingale. The slightness of the tune was very much the point, as the host explained from the podium.
Never mind that his rhetoric got a shade lofty; Tilson Thomas and the musicians effectively demonstrated how the song’s melody served as a richly productive seed for the Third Symphony’s Scherzando (originally equipped with the programmatic title “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me”). The performance of the full movement had its fuzzy edges. But Mark Inouye’s offstage trumpet solo was a highlight of the evening, a sustained instrumental song at once delicate, soaring, and heartwrenchingly pure.
The other, more-assured long-form playing of the night came after intermission, with the Scherzo from the Seventh Symphony and the Rondo burleske from the Ninth. Here Tilson Thomas’ approach was both tightly focused and expansively insightful. Brief passages from five of Mahler’s symphonies, plus one by a possibly influential but less gifted contemporary, served as a bravura catalogue of Mahler’s parodic and sometimes ferocious sense of humor. Give high marks to the musicians for instantly switching gears from the mocking to the morose, the baleful to the hysterical.
The Seventh Symphony Scherzo was a marvel of furtive rumblings, scuttlings, and blaring near-obscenities. There were splatty bassoons, swooning strings, rude brasses. Positioning the violins across the front of the stage, on either side of the podium, added a bright, string-forward sheen. Even better was the caterwauling, sobbing, sneering portrait of himself that Mahler drew in the Ninth Symphony’s Rondo. Here word and deed were perfectly joined, as Tilson Thomas’ flair for the startlingly apt observation was fulfilled and then exceeded by the performance itself. The orchestra found all the right shrieks and sighs, glaring colors and inner shadows of the movement.
As this overflowing, sometimes disordered evening came to an emphatic close, the Mahlerian illogic of it all made perfect sense. Inordinately fond of quoting himself and others, Mahler turned inward to create an enormous, sometimes chaotic, and always compelling musical universe.