Photo by Isaiah Vazquez
David Fox, from the Kimmel Performing Arts Center
Two different yet similar stories have dominated classical music news in the last few weeks. Boston Symphony leadership announced they would not renew Andris Nelsons’ contract as Music Director. Reasons for this remain sufficiently opaque to invite speculation (“not aligned on future vision” is a key phrase in the announcement), but Nelsons’ frequent appearances outside of Boston are almost certainly part of it. “Overstretched” and “overtired,” wrote David Allen in the New York Times.
Surely, I wasn’t the only Philadelphian who thought about Yannick Nézet-Seguin, who at the same time was moving between here and New York—his two main jobs (but not the only ones). Specifically, YNS’s calendar looked like this:
- March 6, 7, and 8: Mahler Symphony No. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra (where he is Music and Artistic Director)
- March 9: Tristan und Isolde production premiere at the Metropolitan Opera (where he is Music Director)
- March 10, another performance of his Mahler 2nd, this time at Carnegie Hall.
(I can almost promise you that on the seventh day he was not resting.)
If this sounds like a cautionary tale for YNS, it’s not—at least not now. Rather the opposite: I’m here primarily to report on his Mahler performance, which I would account as one of the great triumphs of his career.
This isn’t the first time YNS has conducted Mahler No. 2 with the Philadelphians, nor the first time I’ve heard him do it. (It’s my favorite symphony by some margin, and one I attend every time I can manage it). He did it in October 24, and I heard two performances. They were certainly very fine, but for me ultimately not memorable.
A decade-plus later he has significantly rethought the work in every way. It was clear from the gyrating strings in the opening, which throbbed with an electric sense of urgency. There was a notable variety of tempos here, at more extremes than he had found previously. The initial theme, with its throbbing, almost disconcerting sense of movement (lots of quick sawing in the strings) was often breathtakingly fast… but the introduction of the secondary theme, with its more stable legato, was notably slow and gentle. Throughout, the first movement seemed marked by the interplay between these two moods, which for me brought an almost narrative sense of a world poised between tradition and chaotic uncertainty.
That divided world is certainly my sense of the second movement, with its Ländler melody that begins as a reassuringly pretty dance (surely a nod to Haydn and Mozart symphonies), but in repeats gradually fades away, even disintegrates. It was gorgeously played here, and YNS brought a particularly graceful shape to it, but my own preference is for both a slower tempo and longer rests within some key phrases.
I found everyone back in dazzling form for the Klezmer-inflected third movement, which is precisely the kind of energetic, almost disorganized musical world that Yannick often seems to thrive in.
Photo by Isaiah Vazquez
That is, of course, light years away from the final two movements, which take up most of Symphony No. 2, and which are among the most profound in any music I know. Joyce DiDonato took the alto part, and the hushed poetry and sense of suspended time that she brought to “Urlicht” was unforgettable. (Here and elsewhere, the audience was as close to silent as any I’ve experienced—a testament to the general mood.) Joined later by the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir (superb—bravo to director Joe Miller!), and soprano Ying Fang (absolutely lovely, if not quite soft enough on her key high notes in the “Aufersteh’n, ja, aufersteh’n” phrase), the work finished with an overwhelming sense of scope.
After the final crescendo… pandemonium from the audience.
Am I fan-boying out here? Maybe, but I think it’s more than that. Yannick has a devoted following, but there are certainly nay-sayers, and among the central criticisms are two: that he spreads himself too thin, and that he lacks gravitas.
I’d say this week in March effectively thwarted both complaints. I don’t know how he does it, but YNS clearly is more than meeting his charges at the Met and the Philadelphia Orchestra. This is music-making at the highest level, and the Philadelphia Orchestra sounds as good as I’ve heard them in 35 years of attending their concerts.
As for gravitas, I have never heard a Mahler 2nd that felt more profound than here. (I haven’t heard the Met Tristan yet, but I did attend both concert performances last year in Philly and thought he was in the major leagues as a Wagner conductor.)
It speaks to YNS’s seriousness that he is increasingly making Mahler a central focus. Following this Mahler 2nd, next season with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he will lead Symphonies 1, 3, 5 and 7 – and in New York, during next year he will conduct all of them with orchestra including (in addition to Philadelphia), The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic. Personally, I cannot wait.
Photo by Chris Lee
Dan Johnson, from Carnegie Hall
Maybe it’s not fair to him, but I can’t help hearing Yannick Nézét-Séguin’s every performance as an interpretation conducted by The Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera. On Tuesday Night it was Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Am I just projecting my expectations onto him as an artist? Or did the Met conductor lock onto something with his interpretation of the Viennese maestro’s greatest masterpiece — one opera conductor to another?
My usual preference, when it comes to Mahler interpretation, is shameless self-indulgence. That is, I want a conductor to make the most of all the markings in the hyper-detailed score, which fairly bulges with sudden shifts of tempo and dynamics, wrenching the audience this way and that through the psychological turmoil that plays out over the course of each movement. I want a conductor who treats every one of the piece’s emotional climaxes as if it were the end of the world. Yes, I know, this is what is known as “bad taste.” But that’s just me — I’m a sucker, a total mark.
Yannick‘s interpretation was… well… not that. He was attentive to the score, but treated the markings as nuances, not as big emotional swerves. He did take pains to highlight the lyricism of the piece’s many brief solos, giving each player a moment to shine rather than simply cross-fading them in and out. But each of the solos, each of the big climaxes, was carefully measured, one building to the next, gradually heightening the drama, not derailing it. And to my shock, I loved it.
The piece opens with a startling flourish, a growling, scurrying, bestial unison from the low strings. But here, and for the whole of the introduction that followed, the orchestra seemed to be holding something in reserve, always pushing forward to the next set of material instead of wallowing in the moment. It was, I realized, the logic he would bring to an operatic prelude, patiently expositing each of the themes from the show to come, but not trying to wear out the audience before the curtain has even had a chance to rise. It wasn’t until that growling figure returned that I felt that the piece had even truly begun.
But by the time the orchestra reached what is arguably the most dramatic climax of the movement—a terrifying, constantly building dissonance—its resolution left me literally shuddering in ecstasy. My body wanted to sob; I had to consciously prevent myself from making a sound and annoying my neighbors in the audience.
My brother David, a violinist, taught me to love the music of Gustav Mahler when I was a kid, and maybe Dave ought to shoulder some blame for my perverse interpretational preferences. He taught me to love the music’s extremes, its expressionistic excesses, its sardonic scherzi, its shocking fortissimi and brutal dissonances.
But really, he said, what made the symphonies of Mahler so special is that tucked away inside each of them was some of the most beautiful music ever written. The most obvious example is the Adagietto from the Fifth, but if I could take and keep only a single movement from his entire oeuvre and listen to it on eternal repeat, it would be the Adagio here: the Urlicht, his setting for mezzo and orchestra of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
Again, my tempo of choice for this slow movement is as slow as humanly possible—funereally slow—I want time to stop. The first three movements of the symphony are constantly pushing forward, restlessly searching and developing, but in the Urlicht, just before the ecstasies of the final movement, is an island of calm. But in this interpretation, the tempo seemed positively casual.
And again—it worked.
Photo by Chris Lee
The last time I reviewed a piece of Mahler’s for this website, I struggled to articulate just what it was that the mezzo who sang a certain performance of Das Lied von der Erde (with this same conductor!) did that left me so unmoved by such a devastating piece. There was a certain naïveté missing from the part, I concluded; in the Urlicht, Mahler specifies that the song should be ”Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht” — solemn but simple —and here, the soloist obliged.
Now, I haven’t heard Joyce DiDonato in this repertoire before. I understand that she’s an intelligent and versatile artist, but I think of her as a master of the Italian Baroque and bel canto styles. What, I wondered, would America’s favorite mezzo do with a song I associate with Christa Ludwig or Janet Baker, this dark, heavy, melancholy lied about yearning for release from the sorrows of living?
Break my heart, is what. With a surprisingly bright, easy tone, she gave the song a childlike innocence, a perfect performance of artlessness. Here and there, she slipped in a little portamento, and every single time, I felt wrenched in my soul.
Compared to this showcase for the alto, the symphony’s soprano role is a bit part: appearing only in the last movement, she seems to be accompanying the chorus and orchestra, rather than the other way around. (Both vocalists were seated amid the orchestra, hidden near the harps, rather than appearing next to the conductor or back near the choir.) I’ve seen Ying Fang sing a couple of Mozart’s soprano roles at the Met—where she’s also sung this part under Nézét-Séguin’s baton—and I’ve always been pleased by the same kind of precise and sensitive musicianship she brought to this part. Instead of trying to steal the spotlight, she played the role of just one more soloist among the many featured in Mahler’s proto-pointillist orchestration. I might have preferred an even glossier, more expressive performance, but I really can’t complain.
La DiDonato impressed once more in the finale, this time by taking on a completely different, more operatic vocal character, suited to the more driving, turbulent writing, and the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir dazzled with the strength and beauty of their sound — kudos to them and to director Joe Miller. The grandeur of the choral sound is central to the effectiveness of the piece’s arc, a sublime flight swooping straight down to hell and then back up to paradise.
And in the end, any quibbles about the performance were impossibly small. Spoiled by the Met orchestra, I had to wonder if their cellos would’ve held together a little better than the outstanding Philly crew when they sped through a wild staccato passage, and as tremendous as all of the vocal and choral performances were, I wished they could have given us a little bit more spit on those German consonants. But all in all, it was a night of dazzling mastery.
And the interpretation won me over entirely. Chorus, organ, outsized orchestra, vocal soloists offstage musicians, extended instrumental playing techniques — Mahler quite literally pulled out all of the stops with his Second Symphony. But this edifice was carefully constructed, every tiny detail of the meticulously considered, as well as the grand architecture of its massive scale. A great conductor has to keep both of these things, large and small, in focus at once. Nézét-Séguin did that, lending force, direction, feeling, nuance, and proportion to a sprawling, chaotic, heartbreaking masterwork.
