SAN FRANCISCO – Herbert Blomstedt, the 98-year-old former music director and now conductor laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, returned to the City by the Bay last week. On the menu was just one piece — Mahler’s expansive, profound, hyper-emotional, visionary Symphony No. 9.
Blomstedt must be the oldest conductor to have ever led a Mahler symphony. Although he understandably suffers from the infirmities of recent illness and advanced age, he doesn’t let that stop him from making music. As recently as the previous week (May 9 and 10), he led the Detroit Symphony in Mahler’s Ninth to general acclaim.
But in San Francisco, time caught up with him — temporarily, we hope.
I was booked to attend Blomstedt’s scheduled second performance on May 16, so I wasn’t present at the first performance the previous night. But from the corroborating accounts of several people on Facebook who were at Davies Symphony Hall that night, as well as in-person attendees and ushers with whom I spoke the next night, it was clear that the maestro was having a difficult time.
When Blomstedt arrived in San Francisco, he was hospitalized for exhaustion and missed the first two of three rehearsals. He made the Friday rehearsal and seemed OK, but that night, he came onstage in a wheelchair in a weakened state and seemed to be gradually unable to stay upright on the piano bench where he was seated. By the turbulent third movement, he was leaning so far that he was in danger of falling, and a violin player grabbed his hand to steady him. The music stopped, and stage hands brought out an armchair with back support for him. Then, the indomitable Blomstedt called out a cue number in the middle of the third movement and somehow managed to finish the symphony. The following afternoon, just a few hours before the performance, the SFS announced that upon doctor’s orders, Blomstedt would be unable to conduct that night’s and Sunday afternoon’s performances.
Fortunately, and presciently, the orchestra had a distinguished ace-in-the-hole ready to step in and salvage Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances. It was David Robertson — former music director of the Saint Louis Symphony, playfully known there as D-Rob — to the rescue. He had already taken over the first two rehearsals from Blomstedt and was on standby to lead the concerts if necessary. And what a galvanizing rescue mission it was Saturday night.
Not having heard Blomstedt on Friday, one can only conjecture how different Robertson’s Mahler Ninth was. He inherited Blomstedt’s orchestral setup — split violins, cellos and basses left-center. But based on the literal, patiently flowing, ultimately noble live recording Blomstedt made of Mahler’s Ninth in Bamberg at 92 in 2019, one of just two Mahler recordings he has made over his long, long career (the other being the Resurrection Symphony with the SFS), I doubt that Robertson’s conception followed Blomstedt’s template.
Robertson’s Mahler Ninth was that of a friend of today’s avant-garde who looked at Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as a forward thrust into the tumultuous 20th century. With animated, tireless, even wild gestures (as opposed to Blomstedt’s customary, self-effacing restraint), Robertson seemed to be tugging and pulling at the apocalyptic rhetoric of the first movement, wringing as much emotion out of those notes as he could. It shrieked with modernist fire, the dissonances laid out for all to hear.
The strings launched the second movement’s Ländler theme with the slow hesitation that Bruno Walter used to stomp off, but Robertson thereafter kept me on the edge of my seat, trying to guess what abrupt transition into a change of pace he would try next. The opening minutes of the Rondo Burleske, gusts of sudden energy aside, could have used more malevolence; he must have been saving it for the coda, which tore into the three accelerating speeds of overdrive just as Mahler intended. In the long, meditative Finale, I heard strength and determination, not spent resignation, with the dissonances again emphasized, and Robertson managed to maintain quiet intensity at the slowest possible tempo on the extraordinary final page of the score.
Having gone back and forth over the completed Mahler symphonies under Michael Tilson Thomas for 25 years, not to mention his Mahlerian predecessors Seiji Ozawa and Edo de Waart, the SFS performed like the unfazed world-class ensemble it became under Blomstedt and Michael Tilson Thomas. Yet not a trace of the dark, polished hardwood MTT string timbre could be heard or felt under Robertson. This was in-your-face, bright, extroverted, often brash, sometimes delicate Mahler playing, an orchestra giving all it’s got in a strenuous effort to make up for the absence of its conductor laureate.
Although the upcoming SFS performances of Beethoven’s Ninth under James Gaffigan in June are the designated concerts dedicated to the memory of MTT, I think these Mahler’s Ninths should have received the dedication. MTT’s debut with the orchestra in 1974 was with this very same piece, and Robertson’s performance — though quite different than Tilson Thomas would have done it, especially in his last years — had that “go-for-it” spirit he used to inspire.
