Last weekend, Angelinos had the chance to see the 87-year-old grande eminence Zubin Mehta conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he served from 1962 to 1978 as music director. During his tenure, the orchestra developed the signature Mehta style, emulating the Vienna Philharmonic. (The Los Angeles Philharmonic is unique among the top orchestras in the world to have dramatically changed its signature sound to fit each music director’s style, most recently having changed from Salonen’s spare ascetic sound palette to Dudamel’s effusively full, rhythmically creamy sound.)
The first half of the program was Schumann’s piano concerto, played by 29-year-old Seong Jin-Cho, a technically superb pianist with a huge international following.
Schumann’s piano concerto is a work of love and warmth, a story of passion and abandon, an ocean of emotions in which one voluntarily lives, breathes, and loves. He wrote the first movement, Allegro affettuoso, with his muse, Clara, in mind. As in many other works, his obsession with her is clear. He takes letters from her name, C and A, and creates with these notes an affable and expectant theme. The shape of this theme, with its descending and ascending movement, creates a sort of anticipation, a feeling of excitement about his love for her. Schumann’s heart is trembling, fresh and hopeful. The name Clara comes back in the development in a sort of call: “Clara! Clara!” in a progression of descending sevenths.
Jin-Cho’s playing was fleet and mercurial, allowing him time for affectionate shaping and bittersweet reminiscence, and, by contrast, with characteristic feather-ruffling attacks, not least in the cadenza. The middle episode, a heart-warming dialogue between piano and clarinet, is one of the peaks of beauty in this movement. The cadenza struggles to find a way out of the labyrinth, resolving in a frantic coda that brings the movement to a breathtaking close.
The second movement is an opportunity to enjoy a beautiful interaction between the orchestra and the piano; both the orchestra and Jin-Cho relished the opportunity for poetically beautiful playing.
The last movement is a happy dance, a celebration of life. Metric and rhythmic ambiguities color the optimistic spirit that swells to exuberant triumph. The concerto concludes in a boisterous mood with the technical fireworks by Jin-Cho at the piano and large supporting orchestral chords in a spirited coda.
In sum, his playing was virtuosic perfection although it was more about youthful exuberant technique than an emotional interpretation. I look forward to seeing him mature as an artist and applying life’s lessons into his interpretations.
Mehta’s authoritative, deeply felt conducting was characterized with straightforward, unaffected interpretations, sensible speeds, vigorous playing, and a great sense of “Viennese” style.
The second half of the program consisted of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The current pre-eminence of Gustav Mahler in the concert hall and on disc isn’t something that could have been anticipated – other than by the composer himself. Hard now to believe that his revival had to wait until the centenary celebrations of his birth in 1960. And yet by 1980 he was more widely esteemed than his longer-lived contemporaries Sibelius and Strauss and could suddenly be seen to tower over 20th-century music much as Beethoven must have done in a previous age.
Mahler, one of the leading conductors of his day, was intent on continuing the symphonic tradition of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Bruckner. But he was also fully immersed in the late-romantic and modernist ideas of Liszt and Wagner. His meshing of traditional and modernist ideas in his symphonies makes his oeuvre particularly innovative.
The first symphony’s orchestration was particularly large for a symphony of that time. (Mahler exceeded this size in his very next symphony.) Yet, the primary reason for enlarged forces is not overwhelming volume, but rather an expanded palette, which enabled Mahler to create individualistic instrumental timbres.
Mahler utilized different types of music, such as folk-dance, songs and band music, as thematic fodder in his symphonies. This was offensive in his time to many who believed this such music unsuitable to the artistic integrity of the exalted symphony.
At the start of the symphony there is a seven octave A in the strings depicting the mood of early morning in high summer; in the second movement a clumsy peasant dance establishes a love of dance which will later grow to an obsession; in the third a weird canon on the tune “Frère Jacques” interspersed with café band music in Mahler’s sleaziest vein illustrates his habit of juxtaposing the gross with the sublime; in the last movement there is music intent on outdoing itself in world-storming excess – noisy triumph exploding with youthful bravado out of self-absorbed emotional reflection.
One of the most important marks that Mahler left on the symphony as a genre is the incorporation of another important genre of the 19th century; the German lied. In his first symphony, Mahler borrowed material from his song cycle Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen, thus innovating the symphonic form and potentially answering questions about programmatic and
The performance included “Blumine”, a movement which Mahler discarded in a subsequent reworking of the first symphony. The name “Blumine” (Goddess of flowers) was the nickname of Soprano Joanna Richter who Mahler had an ardent but ultimately unfulfilled love affair. The movement is a delicate and lyrical interlude that Mahler inserted as the second movement of the symphony. It features a solo trumpet and is characterized by its romantic and nostalgic atmosphere without the composer’s characteristic tension and stress. Mehta, unlike most conductors, usually conducts the symphony with the theme added, despite it being considered by most critics to be lightweight, repetitive, and inferior to the rest of the symphony.
Mehta’s conducting of Mahler’s First Symphony was laden with Teutonic heaviness and he seemed bent on tying the work to the later symphonies rather than celebrating it for the exciting, fresh, and early work that it is. Mehta takes mostly relaxed tempos, far from the intense passion of Bernstein in his day and Dudamel in the present day. He approached the slow movement as an actual dirge, not a parody. Mehta’s peasants don’t dance with earthy robustness in the Scherzo; they’re a bit sleepy after working all day. At the same time, the leisurely place of Mehta’s version made of for beautiful lyrical playing.
While a valid interpretation, I would have much preferred a lighter, speedier interpretation. The LA Philharmonic orchestra clearly has a lot of love and respect for Mehta, and they played beautifully, emitting a rich and rhythmically clean sound in both pieces.