Dudamel’s Mahler Sixth packs emotional power in a sonic spectacular
/By Truman C. Wang
1/13/2024
packed disney hall on january 11. photo: classicalvoice.org
This is a special week at the Disney Hall. Instead of the usual four concerts, the LA Phil played two. And what two these were! The Sixth is probably the most fiendishly difficult (for the players as well as the listeners) of Mahler’s symphonies, so difficult, in fact, that maestro Dudamel had a score propped open on the podium, where he routinely conducts from memory. The greatly expanded orchestra featured four flutes, eight horns, two harps, an assortment of percussion, including a celeste, cowbells and a gigantic purpose-built sledgehammer fit for Thor (or for Donner in next week’s Das Rheingold).
I attended the first concert on Thursday, January 11. The hall was packed to the rafters. The Mahler connoisseurs were glued to their seats in rapt silence for eighty minutes, while the newbies applauded after each movement, blithely ignoring the PSA announcement not to do so on account of a live recording in progress. Maestro Dudamel himself, in rare form, also made an announcement, reversing the order of the andante and scherzo on the printed program – following the old edition of the symphony, not Mahler’s own practice.
Dudamel’s account of Mahler’s “Tragic” Sixth was, in a word, shattering – both emotionally and sonically. Those two hammer blows really shook up the hall like no other instrument. (He omitted the third hammer blow that “fells the protagonist like a tree.”) There was the sense – essential in Mahler – of individual voices raised, one after another, in eloquent lament or protestation. The Sixth being the only Mahler symphony in a minor key is unrelentingly shrouded in dark and gloom, mirroring the composer’s state of mind in 1906 after the death of his daughter Maria, and his own diagnosis of heart problem.
Dudamel’s scherzo clocked in at a blistering 12 minutes 30 seconds (normally 14 minutes), the andante was a brisk walk at 15 minutes (normally 17), while the outer movements followed the fairly standard durations of 23 and 30 minutes (Solti with Chicago was the speed champ in the outer movements: 21 and 28 minutes. Even Bernstein, notorious for being slow in his later years, barnstormed through the first movement in 21 minutes in 1976 Vienna, but finished the finale in a standard 30 minutes.)
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.