Boston Phoenix
Lloyd Schwartz - November 28th, 2002
Posted: 2002-12-04 09:50:59
AT THE BEGINNING of the fourth of the six movements of Mahler's Third Symphony, a movement marked "Sehr langsam" ("very slow"), "Misterioso," and ppp throughout, the human voice enters for the first time - in Mahler's setting of Nietzsche's poem from the end of Also sprach Zarathustra. The alto sings an oracular utterance: "O Mensch! Gib Acht!" ("Oh Man! Pay heed!"). But this isn't a warning - it's more of a reminder. "The world is deep - deeper than Day imagined. Deep is its woe! Joy deeper still than the heart's suffering." In Mahler's original program, which he decided to leave out of the printed score, this brief movement is called "What Man tells me," and it follows what the flowers and the animals - wordlessly - have had to say, which comes after the vast half-hour opening movement Mahler thought of as the entire first part of a two-part symphony, a movement depicting a life-and-death struggle, the reawakening of Pan, the living force of Nature, rebirth after the mortal darkness of winter.
In Benjamin Zander's latest performance of it with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, his third from when he first played it, in 1985, the alto was mezzo-soprano Jane Struss, Zander's most sympathetic partner in Mahler for 27 years, ever since they collaborated on the "death of children" song cycle Kindertotenlieder, when Zander still conducted Boston's Civic Symphony. Two other performers from that Kindertotenlieder were reunited with Struss in this movement, harpist Martha Moor and oboist Peggy Pearson. The movement begins with a series of plucked harp chords connected by muted rumblings in the lowest strings. Not the harp of angels. In Moor's hand it seemed to reach down into the depths of the earth, just as Struss's voice seemed almost unconsciously to arise from some deep wellspring out of the body. "What does the deep Midnight say?" she asks, and Pearson's oboe answered with another question, an uncanny and technically "impossible" upward slide, almost a cry of pain (this was echoed by Ronald Kaye's English horn).
This brief movement was, as it should be, the soul of the performance. Struss was in her most heartbreakingly beautiful, richest voice. Her assertion that "joy" is "deeper than suffering" moved me to tears, partly because it was so achingly beautiful, but even more because I believed her. "She causes us to enter her world," Zander said of her in his pre-concert talk. Then in the next movement, she speaks in the voice of tormented Peter, who can't believe the angels can offer forgiveness. John Dunn's Boston Boy Choir, up in the Sanders Theatre balcony, sounded, as they should, like boys imitating bells ("Bimm bamm bimm bamm"), and the women from Jeffrey Rink's Chorus pro Musica, in the opposite side of the balcony, rained down their promise of heavenly joy. In a marvelous coup de théâtre, Struss and the two choirs remained standing for a few moments as the consoling beneficence of the final Adagio movement ("What love tells me") began - and began to sink in.
The entire symphony was splendidly performed. The opening call for eight horns sounded like a single instrument of annunciation. Darren Acosta gave an astonishing, moving rendition of the opening movement's crucial trombone solos - complex recitatives and arias of lamentation ("fettered life in its chrysalis, striving for release," Mahler called them). Pearson's oboe and concertmaster Wei-Pin Kuo's violin, playing a tender lullaby for the sleeping Pan, were an oasis of enchantment. Nine percussionists rumbled and strutted and marched, getting closer and closer. Even on its vast scale, the movement flew past.
Part two (the flowers) began with a graceful, urbane Viennese minuet (oboe accompanied by pizzicato violas). In the Scherzo, the country music (the cuckoo has died, but the nightingale lives) is interrupted by the famous offstage reverie for "posthorn," Mahler's childhood reminiscence from living near a military camp. Principal trumpet Jeffrey Work and the on-stage shimmer of pianissimo violin tremolos made it sound like poetry.
Zander's inexorably unfolding slow Adagio was more controversial, especially in the way he evened out Mahler's subtle changes of pace. (The textures would have been even more transparent had he, like Dohnányi, divided the first and second violins.) But I found his steadiness - and restraint - affecting, an embodiment of the "rich, fulfilled, noble tone" Mahler had hoped for. Before the concert, Zander talked about this symphony as a "weapon of mass construction." Hearing it in the immediacy of a live performance made it seem all the more urgent a prayer for love and forgiveness and peace.
