Wednesday, 9.3.08, 6:00 am
Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Vienna Mahler in Salzburg
The first four of the Vienna Philharmonic’s five concerts at this year’s Salzburg Festival were conducted by Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Nott, Riccardo Muti, and Mariss Jansons, featured works by Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók (Boulez), Bach, Mahler, Ives, Schubert (Nott), Brahms (Muti), Webern, Berlioz, and Brahms again (Jansons). The fifth program on the prepenultimate and penultimate days of the festival was conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featured Mahler’s most Mahlerian Symphony – the overstuffed, intense, and exhilarating Third Symphony.
The Symphony, Mahler’s longest by some measure, has sublime moments and plenty of them, but it can be difficult to find your way around it: It’s a quilt of music and never just straight forward or clear-cut. It has two large outer movements bracketing four smaller movements – the first movement alone takes over half an hour. Michael Gielen likens the Mahler Third to Robert Musil’s novel “The Man Without Qualities”. Gratifying, because I love Musil’s novel about – essentially – nothing and just like the Third Symphony, I’d never claim to wholly understand it.
Gielen also quotes a Georg Trakl poem in talking about this Symphony – apt in this case, because Salzburg has Trakl poems liberally sprinkled all over town, carved into stone plaques. And like Trakl’s poetry, much of the Third is “flavor” – which you either relate to, or not. This relation – to a time, a mental state, a social setting, a mood – can only be made possible to an outsider (someone who has not had similar experiences, lived similar moods, nor known a similar social environment) through music, not theoretical constructs. Mahler’s original movement titles may therefore provide answers to intellectual questions we have, but cannot evoke any feelings that the music can’t rouse. Which is also what Mahler said: “No music is worth anything if first you have to tell the listener what experience lies behind it.”
The Salonen-Vienna performance illuminated the symphonies’ difficulties. Even though the Vienna Philharmonic displayed absolute unity in the strings (throughout), a brass section that surprised and delighted with clarity and accuracy (unfortunately only until about the third movement), well defined woodwinds and percussion, and impressed with an altogether vivid sound in the fine acoustic of the Large Festival House, there was something distinctly lacking.
Either the reason therefore or result thereof was a particularly episodic impression that made the digestion of this behemoth more difficult than ideal. The second movement (“What the flowers tell me”) had a studied swing in its gait, and deliberate lightness. In movement three (“What the animals tell me”) even those animals imparted a sense of control – orderly rambunctiousness! There was wonderful delicacy in the strings while the distant trumpet(s) sounded from behind the stage: just one of many marvelous moments that, alas, had some difficultly forming a unified whole. Zeal and excitement were offered only with prudence and coolly so. The luring cliché of Salonen offering nordic, ‘Sibelian’, Mahler becomes all too tempting to abuse. (And an impression not necessarily reinforced by his clean yet sumptuous 1997 performance on Sony with Anna Larsson.)
In the fourth movement’s “Oh Mensch” Lilli Paasikivi’s mezzo sounded a touch distressed; plaintive, not unlike the reeds that echo it. A suitable voice, if not exactly a vocal revelation. The Vienna State Opera Choir and the Salzburg Festival Children’s Choir did their angelic job in the “Bim-Bam” of the fifth movement well enough, but only the soft, sonorous rise of orchestra following it truly tugged at the heart strings: a touch too controlled to be tear-inducing, but very nearly so. The cumulative power of the terrific finale cannot and did not fail to be inspiring. The applause that follows such a work – and did here – always strikes me as directed at the work more than the performance per se. For all its individual qualities – each deserving of the ovations – this one remained in the category “very good”, not “life-altering” which I had secretly hoped for. A case of luxurious disappointment.
An oddity: Timid applause after the rousing first movement was hissed down by the Festival audience only for that (admittedly artificial) silence to be disrupted and undercut with broad applause when Salonen returned to the podium to continue; at least as odd as the applause when the choir tried to sneak onto the bleachers before the fourth movement. It is apparently uncouth to applaud stirring music (and the first movement was exceptionally played, too), but perfectly fine to dole out appearance-applause at any point new artists enter the fray?