Last night San Francisco Symphony Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead the ensemble in the last of his four subscription concerts. The program consisted entirely of Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony in A minor, performed without an intermission and lasting about 80 minutes. I suspect that there is a general consensus that this is Mahler’s darkest composition. That darkness is encapsulated early in the opening movement when three trumpets blare out a vigorous A major triad, only to have the middle drop a half-step, lowering the chord into A minor.
There is intense energy in the grim determination of the outer movements of this four-movement symphony. However, the major-to-minor motif summons dark clouds to hover over the intense energy behind all of the principal and secondary themes. Within this framework are the other two movements of the symphony, whose order was never finalized by the composer.
The Scherzo unfolds its own dark rhetoric to complement all the sinister gestures in the first movement. The Andante moderato is the only one of those four movements to provide a major-key escape from the overall context. MTT’s performance placed the Scherzo before the Andante moderato, which is the order I have observed most frequently in encounters with both performances and recordings. (John Barbirolli is the conductor I know best for reversing that order.)
Mahler structured the final movement around “three hammer-blows of fate.” This was realized by a massive drum struck by a wooden “hammer” so large that the percussionist needs both arms to manage it. In previous Davies performances one could only see that hammer rise and fall at the rear of the percussion section. For last night’s performance, MTT arranged to have that instrument in clearer view, situating it at the top of a metal framework, requiring Principal Percussion Jacob Nissly to wield the hammer from the front of the Center Terrace. The sight was nothing short of awesome, making the hammer-blows all the more bone-chilling.
The last of those hammer-blows was intended to represent the fall of a “hero” figure that serves as the protagonist of the symphony. However, while working on the symphony, Mahler encountered his own hammer-blows: the death of his daughter Maria, the diagnosis of his heart disease, and the termination of his directorship at the Vienna Opera. He thus saw the third of his symphonic hammer-blows as a metaphor for his own death; and he removed it from the score. Nevertheless, the final chord of the symphony, A minor without the preceding A major, is dark enough to send chills down the spine of just about any listener.
During his tenure as Music Director, MTT recorded this symphony and prepared it for several seasons. Last night the prevailing rhetoric was as intense as ever. There were times when it seemed as if MTT had formed a bond with every one of the performers on stage, making sure that each of them contributed to the overall listening experience, even if only as one of the voices in the string section. As might be guessed, the chemistry that brewed on the Davies stage spilled over into the full-house audience, allowing MTT to let that final chord echo through the entire space before relaxing his posture on the podium, after which the audience erupted with vigorous applause.
Even for those familiar the MTT’s previous approaches to this symphony, last night’s experience was definitely “one for the books.”
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