“And one for Mahler.”
That’s an exuberantly drunken line from Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which is being sung nightly at the Ahmanson Theatre as part of the Sondheim revue Old Friends. Coincidentally, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Mahler Grooves festival is unfolding in parallel at Walt Concert Disney Hall, just at the other end of The Music Center.
Gustav Mahler has taken over downtown Los Angeles’ cultural center. The LA Phil Store is selling a reissue of the groovy bumper sticker that gave the orchestra’s festival its name. In between the main concerts, which continue through March 9, a Mahlerthon was held at Disney Hall on Sunday, March 2, featuring Los Angeles area youth orchestras. We’ve certainly come a long way from the bad old days, 60 years ago, when a group of young men picketed The Music Center to protest the lack of Mahler programming.
Nowadays, Mahler is a box-office draw, as the full house for the LA Phil’s concert on Saturday afternoon, March 1, attested. And the packed audience was primed not for a familiar Mahler work but for the mysterious, farseeing, still-not-often-performed Symphony No. 7, which has a reputation for being the most difficult of the composer’s cycle, especially its final movement. The Seventh was the last of Mahler’s nine completed symphonies to be recorded, having to wait until 1953 for the first LPs to emerge. As late as 1969, one baffled scribe wrote, “This 1905 work is for the faithful only — hectic, patchwork, blurry Mahler that is less than sublime.”
Funny thing is, the Seventh was my personal gateway into Mahler when I was just 13, and the movement that grabbed me the hardest was that deliciously riotous collage of a finale. After a first movement of funeral marches, two “Nachtmusik” movements — one sinister, the other an amorous serenade — and a central Scherzo with scary things going bump in the night, the finale comes off exuberantly and prophetically. It’s both a satire on Western classical music and an early 20th-century premonition of the old European order being on the verge of buckling and collapsing. In retrospect, it was a good thing that no one told me beforehand that the Seventh was supposed to be a tough one.
For his part, LA Phil Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel has never seemed afraid of the Seventh. It was the best performance of his 2012 Mahler Project here, and he would make a recording with the same group who played the work at Disney Hall, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, just a few weeks later.
A lot of what made the live Simón Bolívar performance so memorable came flooding back when Dudamel took the podium on Saturday with the LA Phil, which had not played the Seventh under his direction until now. As has been habitual with Dudamel’s Mahler lately, the tempos were generally quicker than they were 13 years ago. The first movement barreled on in a feisty, craggy, unfussy way, with a loud and fast coda that triggered a whoop from someone in the audience. The playing was not quite up to the Phil’s polished capabilities, but no matter.
Dudamel kept a steady march pace through much of the first “Nachtmusik,” with wonderfully atmospheric cowbell tinkles wafting from somewhere in the balcony. The Scherzo had a fine swirling rhythm, with an adequate scream emerging from the second oboe at the outset. The second “Nachtmusik” was relaxed, graceful, not too fast. For all that was right about the middle movements, with the Phil’s playing improving noticeably, Dudamel’s view of the music, like most of his Mahler interpretations, was too bright and sunlit, not quite tapping into the creepy darkness and terror.
Yet the brightness, bursting with exuberance and even a touch of recklessness, made the Rondo-Finale rambunctious fun. Underneath the madness, Dudamel held together the mosaic of disparate fragments, which isn’t easy. And with a delicious roar of happy, extroverted chaos, the orchestra knocked the spectacular coda out of the park.
The ecstasy was back. As Sondheim would say, “I’ll drink to that.”
