Review: Dudamel gives Schubertian tragedy a surprising buoyancy

The young Franz Schubert has a friend in Gustavo Dudamel. Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic began a cycle of Schubert’s symphonies with the opening concert dedicated to the youths dying in protest marches in Dudamel’s native Venezuela. Among the dead was a teenage violist around the age that Schubert had been when he wrote the two symphonies on the program.

You never know from whence life can spring, and Dudamel made the tremendous gesture of approaching two works of juvenilia with the attitude that no note be taken as trivial. These symphonies, then, symbolized the ways in which roots of budding genius require nourishment. Feet off the brakes.

With the third and fourth symphonies Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the tragedy of the loss of young life became the actual content of the program. An innovation in this cycle is to place a set of Mahler songs on each of the four programs between two Schubert symphonies, and this time it was “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children).

With feet still off the Schubertian brakes, Dudamel here took the opposite, helpful approach of specifically not making every note matter. Instead, he smoothed out youthful excesses of one of the great prodigies in any field having reached an awkward age when his ambitions started getting ahead of his abilities.

Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 is a jolly work by an 18-year-old who, the program notes reminded us, that year also wrote four operas, 145 songs and two masses. The symphony was cranked out in less than two months (after also completing his Second Symphony that year). It begins with a show-offy introduction and then takes off happily, following symphonic convention but with many instances of genuine invention and distinct personality. He is a happy Schubert feeling his oats with far more notes than he needs and in no mood to slow down or pare.

Dudamel’s grim determination of the previous week would have been of no use here. Instead he captured the joy. In a deceptively virtuosic display, he embraced symphonic innocence as play and without a trace of condescension.

This was, thus, the saddest of prologues to “Kindertotenlieder,” which opens with oboe and horn in desolate counterpoint, every pitch sounding a bottomless pool of sorrow. German baritone Mathias Goerne then sang the opening lines of the first song, describing the morning sun rising for all but he who has lost his children, with a haunting hollowness.

Mahler’s five songs are five steps of mourning, from hopeless incomprehension to a longing for peace, for allowing light to be light. Goerne’s performance was one of ever striving for something larger than himself, from seeming to find something in himself from each phrase but not knowing what the something is and being surprised by every new phrase.

I saw the baritone do exactly the same thing last summer at the Salzburg Festival against a carefully controlled background of Vienna Philharmonic beauty enforced by Zubin Mehta, and Goerne seemed in constant danger of mannerism. Dudamel, though, allowed every wrenching voice in Mahler’s spare orchestral writing to interact with Goerne in group processes that resolved in a long, pregnant silence at the end that was not so much sad but appreciative of all that remains.

Following “Kindertotenlieder” with Schubert’s Fourth Symphony proved yet another programmatic inspiration. The Fourth is know as Schubert’s “Tragic” Symphony, all sturm und drang, and it begins with an introduction fashioned after the “Let there be light” opening of Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation.”

Composed a year after the Third, the “Tragic” is Schubert’s first symphony in a minor key and his most problematic orchestral work. Emotions roil with teenage indulgence, Schubert often barreling on in a barrage of notes and stormy effects.

Dudamel warmly yet astutely accommodated Schubert. In the first movement, he elucidated an underlying lyricism that showed where Schubert was really going. He also gave an extra punch to the movement’s over-the-top coda, again showing where the composer might ultimately take this kind of gesture. Someone in the audience loudly whooped his approval, and Dudamel amusing raised his fist in acknowledgement.

The Menuetto is, curiously, the symphony’s most radical movement, with its irregular rhythms, which some conductors like to treat as proto-Stravinsky, but which then causes the bland middle trio section to seem especially weak. Dudamel found the novel solution of maintaining a sense of continual three-four time over a changing landscape, as though couples kept waltzing on a cruise ship as it sailed over rocky and smooth seas.

In the end, Dudamel trusted Schubert enough to place mood over matter when that’s what mattered to one of music’s most astonishing prodigies at this point in his development.

mark.swed@latimes.com