LOS ANGELES — In a time of big-thinking late-Romantic blockbuster pieces, Arnold Schoenberg’s gigantic, 110-minute symphonic song cycle-cantata/quasi-opera Gurrelieder may have been the biggest and baddest one on the block. The size of its forces outdoes even that of Mahler’s contemporaneous so-called “Symphony of a Thousand.” Gurrelieder isn’t performed very often for that reason and also because its composer has suffered from a forbidding reputation up to the present day.
But whenever it has been done, Gurrelieder always makes a huge impression on audiences. And so it did at a packed Walt Disney Concert Hall on Dec. 15 — deservedly so in a magnificent performance by Zubin Mehta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a cast of hundreds. Gurrelieder was originally supposed to have been revived at the LA Phil by Gustavo Dudamel to close out the orchestra’s centennial season in 2020, but the Covid shutdown scotched that, making the Mehta performances over the past weekend in effect the fulfillment of an IOU after a four-year delay.
Gurrelieder consists of three parts – two huge sections forming a sandwich around a tiny middle section – and it starts out depicting the romance between King Waldemar and the maiden Tove within Gurre Castle in defiance of the inconvenient fact that Waldemar is already married to someone else. When his wife finds out, she has Tove killed, and the heartbroken Waldemar is condemned by an offended God to lead an army of the dead on an endless wild hunt. In the end, the lovers are reunited in eternity as the sun rises and choral splendor breaks out. The similarities with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in plot and hyper-Romantic harmonic language are probably not a coincidence.
It looked to be a triumph, given the ingredients that were in place. Mehta has had more than half a century of experience with Schoenberg in general and Gurrelieder in particular. When he came to the LA Phil as its twenty-something music director in the 1960s, Mehta thrust Schoenberg’s music into the repertoire of the composer’s onetime hometown orchestra. One of his first record releases with the Phil was a passionate rendition of Verklärte Nacht, and he even waded into the thornier thickets of the 12-tone Variations, Op. 31, on records a couple of years later. He introduced Gurrelieder to Los Angeles audiences in 1968, repeated it here in 1977, and programmed it in his farewell concerts as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1991 (released on CDs by Sony).
Now at the grand age of 88, with the LA Phil playing consistently better for him over the last decade than it ever did, Mehta produced a sweepingly spectacular Gurrelieder of eloquence and depth. Conducting from a seat on the podium, as he has done since recovering from hip surgery and a bout with cancer a few seasons ago, he no longer projects the dynamic physical pizzazz he had when he was young and middle-aged — and it doesn’t matter a bit. He still conveys total command using a limited range of gestures, with not a wasted motion among them.
Mehta’s pacing overall was a little bit slower than his New York performance and all the more effective for it, starting with a broad treatment of the magical prelude that revealed acres of lush, gorgeous detail, undergirded by a rhythm that seemed to breathe in and breathe out. The climaxes detonated with all of the power the huge ensemble could muster, and one orchestral interlude after another flowed without a break in the line. The orchestral backing for Klaus the Fool’s manic solo turn was full of prickly sardonic humor; the final chorale celebrating the sunrise blazed and sparkled.
We heard the anticipated waves of Wagnerian power singing from soprano Christine Goerke in the role of Tove in Part I. Tenor John Matthew Myers, a last-minute sub for the indisposed Brandon Jovanovich, did a capable job of interpreting the part of Waldemar, though he was often overmatched in the volume wars by the augmented LA Phil. Mezzo-soprano Violeta Urmana made a tremulous, well-projected showing in the “Song of the Wood Dove”; baritone Gabriel Manro put forth the part of the Peasant in a declamatory style, matching the tension in the orchestra (he was the only singer who had the music memorized).
Tenor Gerhard Siegel was an excellent Klaus the Fool in two sections where Schoenberg brought something of his 1911 progressive self to a score mostly written in 1900-01, when he was a Wagner acolyte, and veteran baritone Dietrich Henschel’s Speaker offered an authentic display of sprechstimme (Schoenberg’s self-patented balancing act between speech and song). The Los Angeles Master Chorale, 121 voices strong, roared, mourned, and exulted in Part III.
Although Schoenberg, in one of his last letters written a year before he died (“ONE THING IS VERY IMPORTANT,” he wrote in upper case), strongly recommended that Gurrelieder be sung in the audience’s native language, I have yet to hear a Gurrelieder in English. This one, like the others I’ve experienced live, was in German. There have been four of them now in my past; the first was a brave 1988 effort by Keith Clark and the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, and two more with Gerard Schwarz (1990) and Esa-Pekka Salonen (2005) with the LA Phil. But the Mehta Gurrelieder tops them all. I expect this performance will be referred to for years to come with the tag line, “You shoulda been there.”
