Lorenzo Viotti’s Mahler in Digital Concert Hall

Elīna Garanča performing with conductor Lorenzo Viotti (from the Digital Concert Hall Web page for this program)

Having now written my account of the “social distancing” concert given by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle for an audience situated exclusively in the Digital Concert Hall, I decided to explore the archives of that Web site. Those archives provide an opportunity to examine not only repertoire but also conductors that I have not yet encountered in the concerts that I have covered in San Francisco. Today I decided to make my acquaintance with the young (about 30 years old) conductor Lorenzo Viotti, currently Chief Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon. According to the biographical material found on the Web page for his concert, he recently made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra; but this seems to be his only professional appearance in the United States to date. His performance with the Berlin Philharmonic consisted entirely of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony in D minor.

This particular symphony is a rather unruly beast, even for the most passionate followers of Mahler’s music. It has six movements divided into two parts, the first part consisting only of the first movement. Two of the movements require a mezzo soloist (Elīna Garanča in this performance); and the second of those two movements has the soloist accompanied by two choirs, one adult (the women of the Berlin Radio Choir) and one of children (the boys of the State and Cathedral Choir Berlin). To say that any conductor undertaking this symphony has his/her hands full is the height of understatement.

However, it is not only the quantity that is challenging. It is hard to avoid the conjecture that Mahler used this symphony to explore a new genre of dissonance. We normally think of dissonance in terms of relations among pitch classes. Dissonant intervals confront the informed ear with ambiguities that need to be resolved by progressing to more stable consonances. However, in his third symphony Mahler seems to be experimenting with the idea that thematic material itself can be rhetorically dissonant.

If a dissonant interval of pitches entails a departure from stability, then the same can be said of how Mahler handles his themes. Throughout the first movement of the third symphony, themes seem to intrude harshly upon each other. They almost appear to spring out of nowhere with stubborn assertions of self-importance; and they never seem to establish a “comfortable fit” in the overall fabric of the movement in its entirety. While that sense of disruptive intrusion is most evident in the first movement, it continues to arise throughout the second part of the symphony. Those encountering this symphony for the first time can easily be forgiven for wondering just what was going on in the composer’s warped mind to assault the ears so violently.

For the most part Viotti rose to the challenges of bringing some sense of overall coherence and progression to those thematic dissonances. Nevertheless, his attention to detailed phrasing strategies to express how these dissonances arise and are resolved led to short-changing a coherent account of the symphony as a whole. In other words he had not yet attained a level at which he could effectively manage everything on his plate. As a result, listeners more familiar with the symphony in its entirety could be forgiven if attention began to flag by the time Viotti had advanced to the final movement, which is the second-longest in the entire symphony (the longest being the first movement).

In the domain of the Digital Concert Hall, this makes for particularly challenging issues of presentation. Not only must the video direction make no end of difficult choices regarding how what one sees will impact what one hears, but also the texture of the score is so thick that balancing the audio signals from an adequately large bank of microphones is no easier. The result is that those experiencing this particular program with memories of past concert experiences (or at least well-produced recordings) may be the only ones to come away from this program with any sense of coherence.

It is entirely possible that Viotti had a clear and logical plan for presenting this symphony to his audience. It is just as possible that an attentive member of the audience at the Berliner Philharmonie would be able to apprehend and appreciate that plan. However, when manipulated through video and audio technology, at least in making this particular video document, that plan never really maintained its coherence in the digital domain.