The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor on Saturday, April 11 was one of those moments when it was good to be alive: it was good to be alive in St. Louis, it was good to be alive in St. Louis at this moment in the evolution of this orchestra, it was good to be alive in Powell Hall when the band was in town and Mahler’s 5th was on the conductor’s podium.
Mahler’s 5th is a widely beloved piece of music, and I sensed anticipation in seasoned listeners who knew what we were in for. A younger man sitting ahead of me in the Lower Balcony curled his arm around his date just as the symphony was about to begin, as if we were climbing up rollercoaster tracks for the first free fall and he wanted to make sure they felt it together in the pits of their stomachs.
Mahler wrote for the depth and breadth of a large orchestra, mindful of the resources of every section and each instrument. Mahler stretched every musician in the orchestra, making constant demands for technique, expressiveness, and ensemble instinct. For those obsessive souls who marry a musical instrument and spend more time with it than with people – that is, symphony musicians – this composition is what they signed up for.
Yet in his 5th symphony, Mahler set apart one trumpet with a part (assigned to Steven Franklin, principal trumpet) that recast what is possible in a musical feature embedded deep in an ensemble. There was no end to the new ways Mahler turned unexpectedly to that one small piece of shaped brass held to one man’s lips to carry the burdens of (to my ears) all creation. Mahler’s 5th sounds and moves like God thinking or life pulsing throughout the Earth, and if you don’t believe in God, then Mahler makes you suspend if not question that disbelief.
Not only Franklin, but every brass and horn player had to be glad to be alive with Mahler’s 5th on their music stands. That one trumpet has a special role, but Mahler strutted his stuff up and down the brass section, tuba to trombone to trumpet to horns, calling for piercing outcries or for the tiniest whispers of trills fading to silence. It is hard to think of music with more fades or dead stops in the middle of a movement, with more startling pickups from those fades and dead stops.
With this daredevil sense of dynamic range and the intense engagement with every instrument, Mahler’s 5th does conjure everything beneath the sun and moon, inviting transhistorical, anachronistic comparisons. Mahler composed the original theme to The Godfather. He wrote the matadors’ favorite bullfighting songs. He scored the Spanish Civil War. He anticipated every melody ever played on a horn by the band Chicago. He wrote gutbucket horn charts for soused New Orleans brass bands. Mahler invented the musical inflections for brash and sassy. He wrote the most finessed music for synchronized swimming.
Mahler also was all hell breaking loose – he was the end time, as he was all the other times.
This fabulously talented orchestra followed Mahler and SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève through all these tornados and cataracts, over all these precipices, into all these jarring dead stops and show-stopping pick-ups. I watched the Saturday night performance within earshot of people who knew the business. One said he talked to a guest soloist who recently came through St. Louis and said this orchestra was “on fire right now.” Denève certainly seemed well aware of what he had on his hands. His body English (or French) while conducting the Mahler was at times balletic. He had to take some risky dance moves to express the music surging through his baton and body.
What on Earth can you put on a concert program along with music of this grandeur and intensity? The St. Louis premiere of something completely different just a month down the road from its world premiere –Double Concerto Suite by Carlos Simon, which SLSO co-commissioned with the National Symphony Orchestra – was an interesting choice.
Born a century and a quarter after Mahler, in an electrified and digitizing world, Simon approached the orchestra like a giant pinball machine and lit up its every corner with color. In brief onstage remarks with Denève, the composer said his double concerto was based in the blues, but I heard brighter, more sizzling hues. One way this piece paired well with Mahler’s 5th was the brash use of brass, which kept the music blinking bright. Another was the use of breathtaking dead stops followed by startling pick-ups. At one point Kevin Ritenauer picked the orchestra up with nothing but a snare fill in a manner that would have made Mahler jealous.
Simon’s brilliant orchestration made the orchestra appear to generate light as well as sound. I score Simon for best use of orchestra for relentless positive energy. Psychedelic drugs never appealed to me (too much loss of control, to distant a departure from the real), but I should think, for those who partake, this was good music to trip to. (Unrelatedly but equally off point, Denève’s hair was grown out to just the right length to look like rock-star ringlets – think: Robert Plant – but not yet Muppet-adjacent.)
I was left deeply puzzled, however, by Simon’s use of the two guest soloists who reportedly were served with a concerto each, here, Hilary Hahn (violin) and Seth Parker Woods (cello). I never heard any writing for either instrument that rose to the heights of a solo, at least a solo that needed a heavy hitter like Hahn. The violin and cello carried lines that sounded like embellishments of the ensemble melodies carried by their respective sections. If the double concerto overall played like a stylish pops composition – a cool opener for Mahler’s 5th – the solo sections struck me as kitschy, better suited to a show in Branson than center-stage at Powell Hall.
Mahler would have the last say on this program to answer any questions left unresolved by the opening piece or indeed any aspect of the listener’s life up until that point. Reflecting on how Simon played this great orchestra like a big, bright, flashing pinball machine, I could hear how Mahler did just the same whenever it suited him. Though Mahler died two decades before the emergence of pinball, listening to how he zinged melodies across sections then smashed them a bass drum, Gustav Mahler, along with all the other anachronisms, was the original pinball wizard.
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