*Part of my series on Mahler, introduced here!*
I’ve celebrated Mahler 3 in an earlier post, featuring great recordings by Bernstein, Tennstedt, Abbado and others. Last week, just after coming back from Milan and Erlangen, immersed in my fieldwork videos of Chinese village ritual, I went along to the Barbican to relish another overwhelming rendition of the symphony, with the LSO conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (website; wiki) in the second of two performances.
Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony and Conductor Laureate of the LSO, at the age of 80 MTT is severely ill with brain cancer (see under the Slipped Disc website). Musicking is always about context—and Mahler 3 is always a moving experience. Just as the Mahler concerts of Tennstedt and Abbado were all the more deeply affecting in their later years, the aura of last week’s concerts was intensified by MTT’s frailty, sidelining any suspicions of West-Coast suavity. As this review of the first concert comments,
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often blithely chat about the works’ epic struggle between life and death, creation and destruction, joy and dread. In a comfy hall with a slick orchestra and a polished maestro, all of that can feel abstract and remote. Not last night at the Barbican.
MTT was a protégé of Bernstein, following in his footsteps. This story, from an article that also includes a chat between MTT and James Brown, is relevant:
Thomas had the opportunity to get to know another great musician, Leonard Bernstein, after winning the Koussevitzky Prize, which is awarded to outstanding student conductors. Bernstein came to a performance of Mahler’s 5th symphony that Thomas was conducting early in his career. After the concert, Thomas recalls asking Bernstein what he thought of the performance, and he replied, “What did I think of it? I think that when you really have made up your mind what it means to you, and what you intend to do about it, it won’t matter to you what I think or anybody else thinks.”
In 2012 MTT pondered his own bond with Mahler and the challenges of conducting the symphonies:
He explores Mahler’s origins and legacy in two documentaries, accessed here and here (part of a series on the, um, Great Composers).
Here he is in the final movements of the 3rd symphony with the Verbier Festival Orchestra in 2016:
As often with Mahler, I tend to focus on the incandescent finale (those quintuplets!!!)—but you have to experience the whole, um, Journey. As with the 2nd symphony, the first movement is monumental too, and as in the 7th symphony, some passages of “sonic goulash” (MTT’s fine term) recall Ives—whose music Mahler used to conduct (see e.g. here). The middle movements also encapsulate Mahler’s world, and Alice Coote’s singing of Nietsche’s text in the fourth movement was intensely moving. The LSO was brilliant as ever, with outstanding brass solos—in what must have been an exceptionally demanding concert. MTT, the LSO, and the audience all pulled together to celebrate Life… It’d be most interesting to learn how the players felt about the concerts.
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I can’t resist mentioning MTT’s From the diary of Anne Frank—both to complement Mahler’s Jewish identity and for some of the most radiant images of MTT with Audrey Hepburn:
Stephen Jones: a blog 