LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel was back in town, and so was Gustav Mahler. Even before Dudamel became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, the two were firmly associated, with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony already a Dudamel specialty. So who better to lead the orchestra in the three-week “Mahler Grooves” Festival opener on Feb. 20 at Walt Disney Concert Hall?
The smartly chosen program of the symphonic master’s early and late works focused on a selection of early orchestral songs, along with “Blumine,” a discarded movement from his First Symphony, and the Adagio from the unfinished Symphony No. 10. Indeed, this concert, called “Mahler’s Journey,” presented a small but memorably panoramic view of how the composer’s songs and symphonies often overlapped.
Perhaps surprisingly, the concert felt lighter, if by no means less profound, than might have been anticipated from such a death-haunted composer.
The lovely curtain-raiser, “Blumine,” featured Thomas Hooten’s sensitive trumpet playing in a carefully shaped, warmly flowing rendition by Dudamel and the Philharmonic. Then came Mahler’s mostly finished Adagio from his projected five-movement Tenth Symphony. The long first movement left to us by the composer — most performances clock in around 24 or 25 minutes (see Boulez and Rattle, respectively) — was polyphonically textured enough to convey a sonic picture of the mixed emotions he may have been experiencing in the summer of 1910, marital discord with Alma and his failing health being paramount. (He died the following May at age 50.)
Yet it’s not clear how tragically Mahler’s Adagio should be taken. Dudamel’s spacious reading (around 27 minutes) found drama and poignancy in the woodwinds, in dark-mahogany sound of first associate concertmaster Nathan Cole’s magisterial solos, and especially in the brass. About two-thirds into the Adagio, Dudamel and the orchestra let rip a twice-repeated searing passage in which dissonance is piled onto dissonance and the trumpets sustain an extended high A. This blast from the brass suggests Mahler was either in emotional disarray or venting a similar ferocity found in Schubert’s alarming Andantino from his Sonata in A major, D. 959.
Overall, Dudamel kept emotions grounded in the score’s melodic beauty and serenity rather than its tumult, conveying a sense that everything will be all right. Dudamel conducted from memory. His stick technique was elegant and communicative.
Following intermission, Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova and British baritone Simon Keenlyside presented characterful, often moving accounts of four selections from Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge (Songs and Chants) and seven from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), an influential collection of German folk poetry going back to 1806. (Baritone Thomas Hampson dubbed these multi-themed tales “a book of life.”)
In “Scheiden und Meiden” (Farewell and parting) from Lieder und Gesänge, Keenlyside was at first overwhelmed by Dudamel’s full-out summoning of Luciano Berio’s expanded orchestration, but the singer soon found his vocal footing with his precise diction in “Ablösung im Sommer” (Changing of the guard in summer).
Since his Los Angeles recital debut in 2011 at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Keenlyside has triumphed over both vocal-cord and thyroid surgery. Never the most powerful singer in terms of sheer vocal heft (he’s been called “the Ralph Fiennes of baritones”), he muscled his way through some passages in the Wunderhorn offerings, including Mahler’s masterful setting of “Revelge” (Reveille), a sinister march in which soldiers appear resurrected as skeletons. But Keenlyside’s impeccable musicianship remained undiminished in the spectral atmosphere he and the Philharmonic conjured.
Mahler used the march rhythm in that song for “Nachtmusik I” in his Seventh Symphony. There was similar overlap between song and symphony elsewhere, including “Urlicht” (Primal light), which became the fourth movement of the Second Symphony. Here, Gubanova’s richly colored mezzo proved moving in its restraint. She was similarly direct and unaffected in “Das irdische Leben” (Earthly life), a heartbreaking tale of a mother and hungry child, in which Gubanova’s gathering desperation was echoed by the orchestra’s woodwinds and strings.
Restraint also characterized Dudamel’s approach to most of the Wunderhorn songs, including “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” (Where the splendid trumpets sound), another showcase for Hooten and company, but appropriately gauged for Gubanova’s focused, minimal vibrato. Here she summoned two lovers, one of whom turns out to be a ghost.
Given the universal tragedy conveyed in the Adagio and many of the songs, rarely has Mahler been so musical and so much fun. Maybe that’s because music is transformative, or maybe it’s because the composer is one of the finest Schubertian-level melodists in history. In any case, this first Mahler festival concert “grooved.”
The hip-sounding phrase “Mahler Grooves” refers to a 1970s cult surrounding the composer in Los Angeles. Predictably, there’s Mahler merch available at the Disney Hall store (a $600, 17-LP limited edition of his symphonies, anyone?), and the Philharmonic website displays Bernstein’s score to the Symphony No. 6 with the “Mahler Grooves” bumper sticker across it.
The festival continues with Dudamel and the Phil in Mahler’s challenging Seventh Symphony (Feb. 27-March 1) and, finally, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Five Songs by Alma Mahler (March 6-9). There’s also a “Mahlerthon” featuring both the Youth Orchestra (YOLA) and Inner City Orchestra (ICYOLA) of Los Angeles, along with the UCLA Philharmonia, USC, and Colburn Orchestras (March 2).
