Arts & Events

In a well-planned concert series devoted to early works by Gustav Mahler, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony performed over the weekend of January 13-15 the symphonic movement entitled Blumine, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and Das klagende Lied. Two of these three works are rarely heard, so this program offered an enticing element of curiosity. Of the three works, however, only the best-known Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfaring Journeyman) lived up to what we have come to expect and cherish in Mahler. Beautifully sung by mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, these songs of lament over a lost love were intensely moving, full of longing and bitterness. Cooke’s vocalism was unerring, her voice richly colored. My only note of qualification is that no matter how great a performance is given by a mezzo-soprano (such as Janet Baker, Brigitte Fassbaender, or Sasha Cooke), these songs were written for a baritone; and to my mind the greatest rendition of them is still the one by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on a recording with Raphael Kubelik conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.  

As for the rest of this San Francisco Symphony program, entirely new to me was the opening piece, a symphonic movement entitled Blumine. This is something the 24 year-old Mahler originally wrote as a third movement of what would become his First Symphony. It was performed as such on two occasions. However, once Mahler dropped it in the process of ordering his First Symphony as we know it today, Blumine (The Banquet of Flowers) was all but forgotten. As it stands, Blumine is a highly sentimental piece of music, even bordering on the saccharine. Its saving grace, however, is that in some ways it foreshadows, albeit in a pale version, the wonderful Adaggietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. 

The featured work in this program – and one might question whether it deserved pride of place over the wonderful Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – was Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, a title difficult to translate, for it suggests both a lament and an accusation. This is a very early work by Mahler, begun by the composer when he was only seventeen and completed when he was barely twenty. Mahler aficionados have gushed over the precocious composer’s audacious orchestration. It is there, to be sure. However, I find little in this hour-long oratorio that rises above a rather banal curiosity.  

To counter this inherent banality, Michael Tilson Thomas once again planned a semi-staged production in collaboration with director-designer James Darrah, with whom he had recently worked, to great effect, in Britten’s Peter Grimes and, to atrocious effect, in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Given the wildly diverging quality of their previous collaborations, I wondered what I was in for this time around. The story is a medieval tale involving two brothers who vie with one another for the love of a beautiful queen. One brother murders the other and wins the queen, but a minstrel happens to find a bone of the murdered brother out of which he carves a flute. Whenever he plays this flute, however, its only song is one accusing his brother of murdering him. Here, in Das klagende Lied, a fine contribution to this semi-staged production came from dancers Rebekah Downing, Alexandra Jenkins, Nicholas Korkos, and Sam Shapiro. Some of their lifts, leaps and catches were dramatic indeed. However, the video projections by Adam Larsen added nothing to the proceedings, and were mostly extraneous. In the end, MTT would be better off sticking to the music and abandoning these Hollywood attempts to gussy up the music with special effects. 

The singers in this Das klagende Lied were excellent, especially the lilting soprano of Joelle Harvey and the full-voiced mezzo-soprano of Sasha Cooke. Tenor Michael König did stalwart work, as did baritone Brian Mulligan. The San Francisco Symphony Chorus, led by Ragnar Bohlin, also provided excellent work. Nonetheless, Das klagende Lied struck me as a rather soporific work, one which only has relevance as an early work of a composer who later went on to do great things. If Das klagende Lied were by anyone other than Mahler or someone of comparable worth, it would now be forgotten.  

One final note: the program for this series of concerts contained a wonderful essay on Mahler and his problematic relationship to modernism by Carl E. Schorske. It was excerpted from Schorske’s book Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism, Princeton University Press, 1998. I recommend this excerpt and the book itself to all interested in Gustav Mahler.