Jennifer Taylor

Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, composed after the already death-obsessed composer was diagnosed with the heart defect that would eventually kill him, ends with one of the great farewells in the song literature. In the final moments of the half-hour “Abschied” for alto, the singer has a vision of a distant, infinite blue light, and trails off on the word ewig—“forever”—allowing the orchestra to complete the line, in a heartbreakingly poignant musical representation of the ways in which death at once forecloses and consummates the promise of eternity. At the end of a concert in Carnegie’s Weil Recitall Hall on Monday night, as Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble through these last measures, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung was visibly overcome with emotion, brought to tears by Mahler’s sublime art.

Would that I had been so transported. Somehow, at the end of one of my favorite pieces in the vocal repertoire, the magic just didn’t happen for me. Why not?

The programming, at least, was not to blame. The first piece was the splendid (and heretofore unknown to me) setting of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage” by Emmanuel Chabrier for soprano, piano, and bassoon. The text will be familiar to any lover of French song, and with rolling swells of melody from all three performers, Chabrier did justice to the poem’s sensual mysteries. The song also set the tone for the evening, which brought together a trio of works in which European composers used the exotic “Other”—in Baudelaire/Chabrier’s case, the “oriental splendor” of the poem’s decadent setting—as a mirror for their own time and place.

Jennifer Taylor

But other than pianist Bryan Wagorn, who ably handled the piece’s surging harmonies, these musicians seemed ill-matched to the score. Susanna Phillips’s voice was bigger than it needed to be, and harsher than it ought to have been; conversely, William Short’s tone on the bassoon was too mild and pretty, lacking the tang that would have suited Baudelaire’s heavily perfumed verses. I’d love to hear this piece again with, perhaps, a chanteuse that could charm a lovebird and a bassoonist that could charm a snake.

The ever-mischievous Thomas Ades took a decidedly tongue-in-cheek approach to his project of exoticization—not of the East, but of the past. The title of his clarinet quintet Alchymia and its constituent movements suggest that it reflects on England’s golden age of Elizabethan music, but his alchemy transmutes this gold into warped brass clockworks, more reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti’s musics of systemic collapse than of the strumming of a lute.

The first movement, “A Sea-Change (…those are pearls…)” takes a descending sequence from lutenist Robert Johnson’s (no relation) “Full Fathom Five” from The Tempest and lets it sink to the ocean floor; “The Woods So Wild” takes William Byrd’s variations on a popular tune and turns its busy figurations into a relentless moto perpetuo; “Lachrymae” takes a passage from John Dowland’s consort variations on “Flow, my tears” and warps it into a helix of relentless sighing.

Jennifer Taylor

Finally, the last movement, “Divisions on a Lute-Song,” instead of actually offering a set of variations on an Elizabethan tune, reverses the process, developing the snatch of tinny street music Alban Berg gives us in the London of Lulu (itself a quotation from a “Lautenlied” by Lulu playwright Frank Wedekind) as if it were a slightly demented lutesong from the London of Shakespeare. At first harmonically, and then conceptually, the whole quintet is a musical ouroboros, composed by and for irony-poisoned lovers of Elizabethan song and 20th century opera.

I adored it, in other words. The playing was immaculate and sensitive, eerie and moving, thanks to the quartet of Jeremias Sergiani-Velazquez, Sylvia Danbury Volpe, Tal First (viola) and Joel W. Noyes (cello), plus Anton Rist on basset clarinet, the rangier woodwind for which Mozart wrote his so much of his loveliest music. In each movement, they let us hear Adès playing with his collection of strange wind-up toys one moment, and toying with our emotions the next.

That reference to Berg brings us full circle to the last piece on the program, another deliciously overripe Viennese rarity. As you may have guessed from the setting of the recital—a stage far too small for a Mahler-sized orchestra—this wasn’t the full version of Das Lied von der Erde, but the chamber arrangement by Berg’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.

Jennifer Taylor

Of course, the idea of arranging a Mahler symphony (in all but name) for a compact chamber band sounds insane. But (as my brother Dave, a Mahler obsessive since high school, once pointed out to me) while he’s known for his grand orchestral climaxes, Mahler’s approach to ensemble is proto-pointillistic, usually treating his massive forces not as a wall of sound but as an army of soloists arrayed into constantly permuting chamber ensembles. Swapping a harmonium and piano into the mix to pad out the texture as needed, Schoenberg’s version is surprisingly effective, lending Mahler’s often archly ironic scores the added irony of a café-orchestra’s sonic palette.

The real problem with this version of the score is that there is no room for error. Mahler’s relay of melodies between the instruments becomes a trapeze act without a net, and if the handoff doesn’t happen with perfect timing… Well, fortunately, anyone who’s heard the Met Orchestra in recent years knows that Nézet-Séguin is an expert at handling pit bands of every size, able to weave his virtuosi into a seamless texture. Right?

Hmm. That didn’t happen. The texture was patchy, the harmonium (not the harmonium!!) inaudible. I’ve heard this arrangement before, live and on record, and I promise you that it does work—but it didn’t on Monday.

Some of the playing was too careful. Concertmaster David Chan played expertly and sensitively, but too carefully. He could have played like the soloist in a concerto, but instead he colored between the lines like a dutiful section player. I still wanted a little more funk on the tone of the double-reed players; Mahler’s woodwind writing, some of his most overt attempts to sonify the exoticism of poet Hans Bethge’s ostensible translations from Chinese, demands a tangier sound than we usually get from players in the Anglo-American tradition. But props to bassoonist Evan Epifanio for giving us a little more color than we heard in the Chabrier.

The standout of the cycle: Ben Bliss, who’s been singing Tamino in the Met’s newish Zauberflöte this season, did nothing to dismiss my suspicions that a tenor who can nail Mozart in a big house is capable of anything. This part is a minefield; survey the discography and you’ll hear tenor after tenor shrieking and barking their way through Das Lied. But he managed not to lose control while still bringing gusto, verve and shine to a part that, without a name, costume, or stage directions, still makes for a more interesting character than Mozart’s prince.

Why wasn’t I as excited about DeYoung’s performance? She was obviously just as committed dramatically, giving her part a larger-than-life gravitas to match her heavy, mature instrument. I went back to the discography again to see if I could find what was lacking, and I think I found it: vulnerability. In Mahler’s most beautiful songs, there are moments of simplicity, even naïveté, where his most effective champions seem to abjure their very selves in the face of the sublime. But it felt as if DeYoung couldn’t renounce the heroic poise she brought to the part—meaning that even as the character she voiced stepped from the mortal world into infinity, we couldn’t quite follow her through to the other side.