Conductor Makes The Most Out Of Mahler
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe, October 5, 2003
Posted: 2003-10-06 10:04:00
The music of Gustav Mahler documents a spiritual journey. "The symphonies and songs tell one story," says conductor Benjamin Zander. "They speak to each other, make connections, awaken resonances."
Speaking like the evangelist for the composer that he is, Zander adds, "By the time we have reached the end of the Ninth Symphony, we feel we have experienced the complete journey of life."
Zander and the Boston Philharmonic are celebrating their 25th-anniversary season together with a series of four all-Mahler programs featuring four of the symphonies and two of the major song cycles.
The celebration opens this week with performances of the First Symphony, together with an additional movement Mahler deleted ("Blumine") and the "Songs of a Wayfarer," with baritone William Sharp as soloist. Later concerts bring equally distinguished soloists, including soprano Heidi Grant Murphy and mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai.
Workshops, master classes, lectures, and broadcasts will also be coordinated with the concerts.
The series represents a milestone in the career of Zander and in the development of the Boston Philharmonic, which is an unusual assemblage of professional, student, and amateur players. The music of Mahler became a crusade for the orchestra, and Zander built a devoted audience for his hair-raising performances even as the Boston Symphony Orchestra was performing and recording the complete cycle of Mahler symphonies under Seiji Ozawa.
What began as a local cult has grown into an international phenomenon. Tapes of Zander's performances circulated among Mahlerites around the world; a 1994 recording of the Sixth Symphony with the Philharmonic reached an international audience. Zander took the Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall for a sold-out performance of the Eighth Symphony in 2000 and began to record the cycle with London's Philharmonia Orchestra for Telarc (four of them have been released, and the Third will be issued after the first of the year).
Zander isn't responsible for creating a central place for Mahler in the international repertoire. That was accomplished by conductors two or three generations before him (in this country, Leonard Bernstein was the great missionary figure).
But Zander has helped consolidate this position for younger generations; he has indisputably brought a new audience to Mahler by making the music more accessible. "To write a symphony," Mahler once wrote, "is to construct a world." Each of Mahler's worlds is full of conflicting opposites that he wrestles into different forms of harmony and resolution. It is music full of hope and despair, raucous irony and striding affirmation, all of it suffused with the sounds of nature; many different kinds of music -- folk songs, country waltzes, military and funeral marches -- crowd into one kind of all-embracing music: Mahler's.
It is music of extreme states of being and feeling, which was the dimension Zander's earlier performances explored. Over the years have come depth, shading, and a fascination with the in-between places, or with the simultaneous presence of diverse feelings. In his hands, these symphonies written a century ago hit us where we live -- they seem to be speaking our language, addressing our needs and concerns.
Zander says there are several reasons Mahler had to wait 50 years for a revival and 100 years to reach his current central position. "The symphonies are full of technical difficulties, for one thing, and most of them are very long. . . . They are very expensive to perform because they require so many players. And when I was getting started, there was still a sense that the symphonies were all the same. Few musicians were close enough to all of them to realize their individuality and interdependence."
Zander's parents took him to hear the Fourth Symphony when he was 12. "It was on the same program as a Mozart piano concerto," he recalls. "The Mahler symphony seemed a very strange and unfamiliar world." Not much later, as a cellist, he played in the same symphony. He heard the legendary Otto Klemperer conduct three Mahler symphonies, which he calls "formative experiences."
But he says the music did not "hit home" until he conducted it for the first time, 29 years ago, when he was the 35-year-old music director of the Boston Civic Symphony. He began with the song cycle "Kindertotenlieder" ("Songs on the Death of Children"), with contralto Jane Struss (who will close the Philharmonic season with one of Mahler's aching songs of farewell). The Fourth Symphony followed, and then the Ninth -- after 22 rehearsals. The performance of this long and difficult work upset the Civic Symphony's board so much that Zander lost his job.
All but one of the Civic Symphony musicians left with him to create the Boston Philharmonic. Since then the orchestra has performed a Mahler symphony in nearly every season. "After the Ninth," Zander says, "all of us knew we had embarked on an adventure that had to be fulfilled."
The conductor says he occasionally listens to tapes of his performances from decades ago. "There are great moments because there were some great players then -- some of them are still with us -- and we also had some wonderful soloists. But the overall performances were pretty scrappy. We have arrived at a totally different level of playing, and I believe I am a better conductor now than I was then. Some people lament the passing of my youthful recklessness and passion for everything outrageous and demonic in the music. I am listening for different things now."
For the past decade Zander has enjoyed a busy second career as a "transformational speaker" for groups of corporate executives. One of the things he tries to do in his speeches is teach his audiences how to listen to what their employees bring to the table.
Zander practices what he preaches: He distributes a blank sheet of paper to every player at every rehearsal and invites feedback. "I want them to tell me how I am doing and how they are doing, what is happening that stands between them and the most expressive playing they can imagine. If I do something unhelpful, I'll hear about it. I have learned amazing things from this process. We can accomplish in six or seven rehearsals what used to take us more than 20."
Oboist Peggy Pearson played in that first "Kindertotenlieder" performance and on many subsequent occasions; she will be in place for the entire Mahler journey this season.
"Ben's boundless passion for music is a good thing to be around. I think the white sheets were very courageous -- they give everyone in the orchestra a voice. He takes a certain amount of flak, but it's worth it because people play with a sense of investment. He encourages us to go out on a limb. Another player said to me, 'It's nice not to be penalized for trying to play expressively.' "
It wasn't possible to rehearse and perform all nine Mahler symphonies for this season's retrospective, so Zander chose his programs carefully. "I wanted to focus on the songs and how Mahler translated them into his symphonies, and on the idea of Mahler as a composer of and about children. It felt right to program the Seventh Symphony because it is the most unfathomable, the least solved. Working with the Philharmonic is natural, easy, and organic -- and informed with a spirit of timeless inquiry."
Thomas C. Moore, Telarc producer and senior editor, has spent hours listening to and editing Mahler performances by Zander. He says, "Ben gets things that even some of the big, famous Mahler conductors do not. In Mahler many gestures are going on at the same time, and Ben balances and voices the orchestra in such a way that you can hear them all.
"When I am sitting down and editing, I have the score in front of me, and in Ben's performances what I see on the page pops out in three dimensions -- all the different levels of intricacy and how they work together. Even a listener not educated in music can hear it; Ben makes it all clear."
Benjamin Zander leads the Boston Philharmonic in Mahler's First Symphony and the song cycle "Kindertotenlieder" Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Sanders Theatre, Saturday at 8 p.m. in Jordan Hall, and next Sunday at 3 p.m. in Sanders. Zander's popular preconcert lectures are at 6:45 p.m.in Jordan Hall and at 1:45 p.m. next Sunday in Sanders; the Thursday night performance incorporates the lecture into the concert. The Mahler festival continues through February. Call 617-236-0999 or visit www.bostonphil.org.
