The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Mahler Grooves festival concluded this past weekend with one of those rare concerts that had to distinguish between two Mahlers. Specifically, Alma Mahler, the thrice-married muse of geniuses, and her first husband, the somewhat more famous Gustav Mahler.
Alma’s maiden name was Schindler, and her ability to attract many of the most gifted artists in turn-of-the-century Vienna gave her the reputation of a world-class femme fatale. (She even inspired a funny song by satirist Tom Lehrer in the 1960s.) What historians generally downplayed until recently is the fact that she was a pianist and promising composer of lieder in her early 20s, before she met Gustav Mahler, who, as a precondition for their marriage, forbade her from continuing to write music. Toward the end of his life, while trying to win Alma back from an affair she was having with the architect Walter Gropius, Gustav relented and arranged for five of her songs to be published.
These were the five songs that LA Phil Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel programmed to lead off the orchestra’s performance on Thursday, March 7, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. That Alma wrote them in 1900 and 1901, around the same time her soon-to-be husband was working on his Symphony No. 5, gave the Phil the perfect excuse to couple the compositions.
Alma’s songs, heard here in orchestrations done in 1996 by Gustav Mahler experts David and Colin Matthews, came off as pleasant souvenirs of late-19th-century Romanticism, somewhat generic-sounding yet certainly worth hearing and not at all imitative of the distinctive colors and contrapuntal techniques of her fiancé. Alma had talent, alright, and one can blame the chauvinistic mores of the era, not to mention the distractions of her tumultuous personal life, for her being unable to follow up on her early efforts.
The LA Phil brought in top-notch firepower with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, who vividly conveyed the songs’ dread, light, and love of nature with her luscious earth-mother timbre. Dudamel and Cooke scrambled the sequence of songs as listed in the program in order to place the longest, “In meines Vaters Garter” (In my father’s garden), last. Cooke used the instrumental interlude to act out the song’s text, stretching her arms and pretending to yawn.
Playing the Fifth Symphony on the day that the LA Phil unveiled its 2025–2026 season — Dudamel’s last with the orchestra — struck a personal note for the Venezuelan maestro. This was the piece that launched his international career back in 2004, when he wowed the jury of the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition. And his recording of the Fifth with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in 2007 still makes a big youthful splash upon rehearing today.
Dudamel’s interpretation of the symphony has not changed much in the two decades since, as Thursday’s performance showed. He took off in the middle of the first movement with much of his old frenzy, and his extreme tempo shifts in the second movement cranked up the agitation even more. The fluctuations in the central third movement are held together better now, and the finale remains fast and bustling with joy, tempered with sleek, sophisticated treatments of the less agitated episodes. As in the recording, the coda simply exploded with energy.
Only the famous fourth movement, the Adagietto, was somewhat different. Dudamel conducted it faster in the beginning while gradually tapering off in tempo, following the score’s recommendations. The performance sounded more in line with the notion that this movement was a musical love letter from Gustav to Alma, rather than a funeral oration or the evocation of a decaying city (as made famous in the 1971 film adaptation of Death in Venice).
What is left for Dudamel to do as a Mahler conductor? Well, there is still something missing — interpreting one of the completed editions of the 10th Symphony, which Dudamel has resisted. But at the press conference for the 2025–2026 season, he indicated that he’s now open to leading an entire 10th, possibly in a future guest-conducting appearance. Let’s hope.
