Mahler has been a specialty and obsession throughout Gustavo Dudamel’s career, and in the opening weekend of the Mahler Grooves Festival, Dudamel curates and conducts a selection of the composer’s music in Mahler’s Journey. He opens with two excerpts from Mahler’s First and Tenth symphonies that frame the composer’s life. Blumine was the second movement from Symphony No. 1, which was removed after a few performances but rediscovered in the 1960s and appreciated for its rapturous trumpet and melancholy oboe. The Adagio from Symphony No. 10 similarly found a new life and was published after Mahler’s death. The unfinished sketches were written during personal crisis and brim with anguish and pain that is expressed through harmonic language that straddles the Romantic era and the 20th century.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) is based on a collection of German poetry of the same name that was influential to Mahler and other Romantics. Two dozen of the poems are set to music that with the help of baritone Simon Keenlyside and mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova explores stories of love, loss, and the supernatural.