For Three Weeks, School Orchestras and Gustavo Celebrate Gustav’s Music in Mahler Grooves Festival
/By Truman C. Wang
3/8/2025
Photo by Timothy Norris
Among the late Romantic composers, Gustav Mahler holds a dominating position in contemporary concert life. It is hard to imagine a time when, in early twentieth century, Mahler’s music was little played and largely scorned, and known to only a few enthusiasts. Then, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Leonard Bernstein, that all changed; conductors as diverse as Solti, Haitink and Boulez have become Mahler champions. Composers, as disparate as Weill, Shostakovich and Britten have owned his influence.
Over a period of three weeks (2/22 – 3/7), the L.A. Phil celebrated the Mahler Grooves Festival. Youth orchestras from across the greater Los Angeles region assembled at the Disney Hall for a ‘Mahlerthon’, to celebrate Mahler’s music and to show off their technical chops, playing complete symphonies, movements and songs. Gustavo Dudamel also returned to conduct the L.A. Phil in the Mahler Tenth (adagio), Seventh and Fifth.
The L.A. Phil program on Saturday February 22, was Blumine, intended originally for the First Symphony’s slow movement, and the Adagio from the Tenth, followed by the Wunderhorn songs. The contrast in emotional content could not have been greater. In the “Blumine”, echoes of the bright, lyrical Wunderhorn world can be heard, but they are absent in the hard, spare sound of the Adagio scoring; the strings are strong, warm, but no longer consolatory. Dudamel’s conducting was disciplined, precise and attentive to passing details and the large form. The players were uniformly superb, with memorable solo from principal trumpet Thomas Hooten.
After the intermission, we heard a selection of 11 songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the earlier Lieder und Gesänge, all 11 songs have the Wunderhorn lyrics. Like Schubert’s songs, the voice types and gender choice for these songs are mostly flexible. In 1900, Mahler conducted 3 of the Wunderhorn songs in Vienna with coloratura-soprano Selma Kurz as soloist. For this performance, we had a mezzo-soprano and a baritone singing in alternating order. In “Das irdische Leben” and “Wo die schonen Trompeten blasen”, Ekaterina Gubanova’s singing was magical. In “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht”, Ms. Gubanova’s voice flowed easily through the lilting, innocent roulades, with the orchestra providing tender accompaniment on the strings and winds, and the flute playing the nightingale. Baritone Simon Keenlyside sang his numbers eloquently with warm tones and telling accents whether they were pastoral love songs or military songs. The audience applauded after each song. The final song, “Urlicht”, was sung with sublime radiance by Ms. Gubanova. Singers, conductor, and players all conspired to cast the spell that makes these Wunderhorn songs so memorable.
The Saturday, March 1 concert was wholly devoted to one work, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, which Dudamel has also recorded with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. Comparison is inevitable. The L.A. Phil players may not match the young Venezuelans in sheer force and brilliance, but their reading on the whole was more convincing, more tightly shaped over the symphony’s sprawling five movements. In the brass-heavy first movement, there was a sense of other instruments making contributions to join an earnest musical discourse, not pushing forward like highly disciplined, all-conquering attack troops. In the inner movements (nachtmusik 1, scherzo and nachtmusik 2), there were mysterious, radiant moments, a sort of Mahler’s version of the ‘Transfigured Night’.) The finale, a rondo-allegro that’s hard to bring off convincingly in any performance due to its disjointed structure, was forceful and well-balanced without being brazen. String portamento, as with other Dudamel’s Mahler readings, was avoided, not simply the regular portamento that Mahler would have taken for granted (deemed old-fashioned today by most conductors), but the emphatic portamento specially written in the score (i.e. the main theme of the fourth movement.)
The next day, March 2, it was all Mahler, all day, at the Disney Hall. From 12pm through 3:30pm was ‘Mahlerthon Part One’, featuring young musicians from YOLA (Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles) in a fiery reading of the First Symphony movement 4, the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles playing a credible Third Symphony movements 1 & 6 (with strong trombone solo). Santa Monica High School Orchestra speed-read through the Fourth Symphony movement 1 (which did not help the unsteady horns), and settled down to a measured pace for Totenfeier and Schubert’s “Death of Maiden” String Quartet No. 14 (arranged by Mahler for string orchestra). These kids obviously had put in long hours of practice for this big event, and it would not be fair to compare them to the musicians in a professional orchestra. Suffice to say they all played reasonably well and, in the Third and Fourth Symphonies, captured the childlike innocence that one encounters only rarely in an adult orchestra.
‘Mahlerthon Part Two’ continued from 5pm through 9:30pm with older college-level students. The level of performance was, as to be expected, higher and stronger, both technically and emotionally. UCLA Philharmonia played a searing Sixth Symphony, following the modern practice of scherzo-andante and 2 hammer strikes. Members of the USC Thornton Symphony gave a dark, probing reading of the A-minor Piano Quartet and a riveting Lieder eines fahrenden Gessellen (Songs of a Traveling Journeyman) with a sweet-toned but uncredited mezzo-soprano. These four songs were given in Schoenberg’s chamber music arrangement including an electronic keyboard that makes the sound of a harp and various percussion instruments. The final concert of the Mahlerthon was an outstanding Second Symphony by the Colburn School Orchestra and conductor Earl Lee. My only gripe was the stop-and-go andante string theme that impeded the flow of the second movement; the performance was otherwise eloquent and incredibly moving. The violins and lower strings were on opposite sides – all the orchestras on this day followed the same layout, interestingly. Kayleigh Decker, the alto soloist, phrased intensely. Madison Leonard, the soprano soloist, soared sweetly. The Los Angeles Master Chorale, prepared by Jenny Wong, sounded rich and thrilling, particularly in the tenor division.
Friday, March 7 was the final concert of the Mahler Grooves Festival, and it was a revelation – not of Gustavo’s music, but of his wife Alma’s. The Five Songs that Alma wrote in 1900-01 during the ‘Zemlinsky affair’ were, if not diamonds, shiny pearls of different sizes and colors. Sasha Cooke, a frequent interpreter of art songs in general and Mahler’s in particular, gave a delightful rendition of these songs, enacting the lyrics with the skill of a fine actress in her accents, tones and gestures. From my seat in orchestra row G, Ms. Cooke’s voice sounded splendidly warm, vibrant and clear. (This was in contrast to the warm but cloudy voices from my upper terrace seat on 2/22.) Some songs were short and sweet, others dark with Wagnerian overtones - the fourth song, about a dark starless night, was startling in its unresolved ending. It was unfortunate that Alma gave up composition as part of her prenuptial agreement with Gustav.
Back to Gustavo conducting Gustav. His reading of the Fifth Symphony was memorable for its visceral excitement as much as for its emotional breadth. The trumpet fanfare opening was no longer crude and jarring as I recalled his Fifth from 17 years ago, but a warm and consoling prelude to a funeral march (whose melody is taken from the Wunderhorn drummer boy) The third movement Ländler was played with Viennese charm and suppleness. The Adagietto was a beautifully shaped love song, not a dirge – fluid and pliant in its songfulness, graceful and heartfelt in its feeling. (At 9 minutes 43 seconds, it was the fastest adagietto I’ve heard, but still shy of Mahler’s own 7 minutes.) The final movement was at once lithe and athletic, ending in a thrilling blaze of sounds.
Photo by timothy norris
Without a doubt, Gustavo Dudamel is an amazing conducting talent. His kinship with Mahler’s music seems to grow and deepen exponentially with each passing year. He is by this time a nearly complete Mahler conductor.
I said “nearly” because Dudamel, like many modern conductors, seems to fear the full, expressive string portamento that is an integral part of Mahler’s music – a topic I have touched upon often in these reviews but will expand here in greater detail. There are two basic kinds of portamento, one ordinary marked a common slur, the other an emphatic long straight line drawn between the notes in question and often accompanied by a description, such as “seelenvoll”/soulful. The latter is not a minor point or just a matter of taste and fashion. Mahler made these specific sliding strings clear in the Adagio of the Ninth and the Tenth, the Adagietto of the Fifth (which the musicians did play), the second movement cello solo of the Fifth, and many others. The effects are lost when the music is not played as written.
In an age when just about every conductor is ready to take to Mahler’s music, and concert halls are sounding out workmanlike Mahler performances, these past three weeks of Mahler’s music at the Walt Disney Concert Hall revealed afresh its strangeness, its poetry, its beauty.
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.