Music Reviews : Sanderling’s Mahler With L.A. Philharmonic

As Mahler’s works have become standard repertory through the last generation, they have become oddly homogenized. The composer’s character as the eternal angry young man has been exaggerated, while his music has been increasingly reduced to hyper-romantic stereotypes.

Trust Kurt Sanderling, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s grand old man of the central European tradition, to right things. Seldom has Mahler the man sounded saner and his music more radical than in Sanderling’s Ninth Symphony, as presented Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Sanderling’s approach, at least for the first three movements, was to banish conventional integration. Let the instrumental colors clash rather than blend. Let the transitions jerk violently, and leave the contrapuntal thickets unpruned.

The results restored the uncompromising originality of the music in purely sonic terms. This was high-risk Mahler, flirting with discontinuity and aural overload at almost every turn.

Yet the interpretive effect remained emotionally centered--earthy, vibrantly physical and filled with positive energy. Gone for the most part was the embittered mockery and metaphysical Angst many conductors find omnipresent here.

Instead, Sanderling’s Ninth was knowing, satirical and often exultant. Outraged at times, to be sure, and shadowed with the certainty of mortality, but never defeatist.

The finale became an impassioned hymn, richly layered with subtexts but ultimately poised in finality rather than swoony or shattered.

Sanderling elicited playing of impressionistic vividness from the Philharmonic. The inventiveness of Mahler’s scoring is a commentary commonplace, but not often made so apparent in performance.

This was not Mahler for apologists, and the orchestra presented it with raucous conviction, sometimes strident and mistuned but never inhibited. For three movements the strings were almost totally buried except in sectional solos, but emerged in ripe, tensile glory in the Adagio.

Mahler could--probably should--have stood alone. Sanderling, though, attached a quirky prefix in the form of Haydn’s Symphony No. 39.

Contrast was clearly the aim here. But although Sanderling sharply downsized the band and included a seldom audible harpsichord, this was not Haydn for the period purist.

Basically a sectional concerto for the first violins, this retro Baroque symphony was given unexceptional direction, and not surprisingly proved soft-grained and largely monochromatic in execution.

This program, the final one of Sanderling’s current three-week engagement, has its last performance Sunday afternoon.