Mahler and Heggie: songs of love and loss from the Philadelphia Orchestra

The specter of death hung heavily over the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first subscription concert of 2025. Yet the mood of the performance rarely felt morose. The approach taken by Yannick Nézet-Séguin to Mahler’s Symphony no. 9 in D major, given alongside a deeply felt recent work, often seemed cheerful rather than complex. The result made for an exciting program that nevertheless lacked the precise emotionality promised by the works and the themes they address.

Few subjects carry as much weight as those that inspired Jake Heggie’s Songs for Murdered Sisters. Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins commissioned the piece after his sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, was killed in 2015 by a former romantic partner. In setting eight poetic texts by Margaret Atwood, Heggie and Hopkins attempt to face head-on the scourge of domestic violence that too often costs women their lives.

Like much of this composer’s output, though, the music came across as melodic and genial, yet slightly general in nature. A number of percussive elements sounded genuinely jarring and conveyed an undercurrent of looming violence – a ghostly cymbal here, a barrelling bass drum there. But the core of the score resided in an overly lush string complement that found Nézet-Séguin overdosing on the customary warmth of this ensemble’s sound, particularly in the cellos and double basses. The result seemed more Romantic than unsettling, and despite defined rests after most of the movements, the songs eventually began running together.

For his part, Hopkins offered an impassioned performance, shading his essentially lyric instrument to convey anger, grief and resignation. In the cycle’s fourth song, Dream, he slimmed his voice to a near-whisper, finding an almost childlike simplicity in the fantasy that his sister might still be alive in some alternate reality. By contrast, he thundered through the penultimate poem, Rage, projecting with operatic fury the desire to end the life of the man who permanently altered his own. To date, only Hopkins has performed this work; it remains to be seen what sort of life it might have beyond his uniquely personal interpretation.

Once a rarity, Mahler’s Ninth is now ingrained in the Philadelphia repertoire; the orchestra last played it just six years ago, with Nézet-Séguin again on the podium. That performance came across as leaner and more focused – a granular approach to a work where themes, and moods, tend to fight each other. Nézet-Séguin’s latest read came across as ecstatic, immediate and somewhat empty. For a work that considers not only the composer’s own mortality but the anguish of losing a child, the account largely lacked psychological tension.

Discrete elements still emerged that put a lump in the throat – the harp motif that studs the first movement was appropriately insistent and jarring – but details suffered at the expense of a massed, overwhelming sound world. Intonation issues also muddled the alleged expression of the composer’s arrhythmia in the brass. The second-movement Ländler sounded more elegant than rustic, and the third movement lacked the tang of Klezmer that suggests Mahler’s compositional insouciance, even in the face of death. Dynamics hardly varied throughout the inner movements: loud and louder appeared to be the prevailing approach.

The symphony concluded on a high note, however, as the sense of agitation at the fickleness of mortality gave way to acceptance and peace. Despite a bumpier-than-usual journey, Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphians arrived at the correct destination.