Salonen Concludes SFS Season with Mahler

The frontispiece and title page of the third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, whose imagery may have inspired Mahler’s settings of the texts (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany license, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the final program of the current subscription season. That program consisted only of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony. This is the middle of a set of three symphonies often known as the “Wunderhorn” symphonies, because they all included movements setting texts of poems from the collection of German folk poems and songs compiled and edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, given the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the boy’s magic horn).

The symphony is a long one, usually lasting about one hour and 40 minutes. It is divided into two “parts,” the first of which consists of only a single movement about 30 minutes in duration. The second part collects the remaining five movements. The penultimate movement is the “Wunderhorn” movement, setting a text that begins “Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang” (three angels sang a sweet song), an account of Peter’s entry into heaven after his sins were forgiven by Jesus. This is preceded by a more secular vocal movement, the “Midnight Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, delivered last night by mezzo Kelley O’Connor. These two relatively short vocal movements are followed by a lengthier slow movement that concludes the symphony. Those three movements tend to be performed with little interruption, suggesting that the work is actually a four-movement symphony with the final movement in three parts.

Salonen could not have done a better job in negotiating the complexities of this monster of a symphony. Mahler had a keen sense of instrumental coloration, and Salonen knew exactly how to elicit the full spectrum of those colors from his ensemble. When I have examined Mahler scores, I have often come across the tempo marking “Nicht schleppen;” and the tempo never lagged under Salonen’s command of the beat. What one can only appreciate in a concert setting (regardless of the high quality of any recording) is how the thematic material is widely distributed across an almost incredible number of different instrumental combinations. Whatever the tempo may be, there is always no end of “action” as phrases keep emerging from different sections in the ensemble. This is music is which sight informs the ear as much as the sounds do.

This was clearly an evening in which Salonen knew how to bring out the best from the SFS ensemble. Those of us that have followed his tenure closely can readily acknowledge how great an asset he has been. As always, I shall be looking forward to what he will bring to next season’s repertoire. My only regret is that the scope of looking forward will be limited to only one more season.