In New York, the last couple of weeks were marked by quite a surge in showcasing Gustav Mahler’s later work. At Carnegie Hall, two esteemed American ensembles – the Baltimore Symphony under the baton of Marin Alsop and the San Francisco Orchestra led by Michael Tilson-Thomas – performed, respectively, the Fifth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde. At the Philharmonic, two consecutive subscription weeks included performances of Mahler Ninth under Haitink and, again, The Song of the Earth conducted by the New York Philharmonic’s music director, Alan Gilbert.
The latter was prefaced by a rendering of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony. This quite rare pairing allowed the public to compare and contrast two different styles that took the symphonic genre in opposite directions. At first, Mahler’s music, full of premonitions of the atonal sound structures of the Second Viennese School, seems to be closer to what we perceive as being “modern”. But with its subtle shifts in tempi, frequent ascending and descending scales, avoidance of extremes and its somehow aimless wandering, the last published symphony of Jean Sibelius can definitely claim its kinship with later explorations of classical music’s boundaries. Gilbert let the fragmentary style of this brief, single movement opus come through, helping the audience sense the stream of musical waves. He perfectly blended string and brass sonorities, emphasizing turns in the musical road when needed.
Das Lied von der Erde, setting to music a collection of Chinese poems translated into German, is as far from the four sections classical symphony as Sibelius' Seventh. Always superstitious, Mahler, trying to circumvent the “curse” of composers not being able to survive their Ninth Symphony, didn't assign a number to what was, for him, a typical symphonic output. This arguably most personal of his compositions is without doubt a true embodiment of the “definition” he gave Sibelius during their encounter in 1907: “a symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything”.