Yannick Nézet-Séguin illuminates Mahler's “Song of the Night”

Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s repertoire on 11th April after a 15-year absence, allowing Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin another notch in his exploration of the composer’s oeuvre. Often when this orchestra programs something outside its standard fare, the musicians respond with fresh energy and clarity in their playing; those elements were certainly on display at the first performance, where they maintained a high level of detail across the work’s sprawling 80 minutes. Sometimes given the subtitle “Song of the Night”, the Seventh can be puzzling in its structure: its shifts between grandiosity and intimacy, between the trademark Mahlerian irreverence and an edgy modernity that prefigures the musical styles of the mid-20th century. Nézet-Séguin leaned into these confounding aspects, functioning more as a fellow traveler with the audience than a precise architect, and the result was a performance of supreme immediacy that often left this listener awestruck.

The outer movements emerged as a study in contrasts. Nézet-Séguin leaned into the fragmentary nature of the Adagio, underlining the melodies that appear and dissipate, only to introduce themselves under different guises. Stripped of their customary elegance and Romantic character, the strings took on an ominous, weighty tone, and the woodwinds, prized of late for their transparency, here displayed a dark and mysterious character. The tenor horn that recurs throughout the movement had not a trace of Alpine zest – it was martial and unsettling. Concertmaster David Kim played his violin solos with a ghostly resonance and a restatement of the central theme in the double basses sent a chill down my spine. The explosive tuttis that capped this section exhibited a sense of foreboding dread.

It was a long journey from this tense, emotionally fraught introduction to the unbridled ebullience of the Rondo-Finale, but by the time Nézet-Séguin and his forces reached that conclusion, their passionate exaltation seemed deeply earned. Mahler alludes to the character of Beethoven and Wagner here without directly quoting either forebear, and those stylistic choices would have been evident even to a novice. A lack of perfectionism crept into moments here – the battery of percussion demands, which necessitated substitute players, occasionally resulted in coordination errors, and the strings sometimes slipped ahead of Nézet-Séguin’s beat in their exuberance – but the wild energy of the performance compensated for any errors.

Between these bookends, we received a Nachtmusik: Allegro moderato that aligned with Leonard Bernstein’s conception of the movement as “nightmare music”. The opening horn dialogue could have underscored any psychological thriller, and the strings that answered had an unsettling martial quality. This was followed by a Scherzo of rough edges and little humor, which dissolved into a tranquil, lilting second round of night music (Andante amoroso). Even the sometimes jarring presence of guitar and mandolin had a ravishingly lyrical quality to them. In both the third and fourth movements, Principal Viola CJ Chang performed his solo passages with an arrestingly beautiful tone.

The Seventh often stands alone on a program. Here, the orchestra paired it with four songs by Alma Mahler, heard in orchestrations by Colin and David Matthews. Program notes made the case for Alma as a stifled genius, living under the thumb of a controlling and mercurial husband. The latter may well be true, but I remain unpersuaded as to the former. Some clever ideas emerge in these songs – like her playful deconstruction of waltz melodies in In meines Vaters Garten (In My Father’s Garden) – but unlike the mature works of another neglected composer’s wife (Clara Schumann), there’s hardly anything that lodges itself in your memory. Karen Cargill brought an alluring, dusky tone to the music, but the total effect felt rather bantamweight next to the thrilling dimensions of the “Song of the Night”.