Lasting Resonance

When the New York Philharmonic arrives in Southern California this week for the first time in more than a decade, it will not bring with it any music by Mahler. But Mahler’s ghost will hover, nonetheless.

On Mar. 31, 1909, in a program at Carnegie Hall that included Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mahler conducted the first concert of a newly reorganized Philharmonic. And he remained as the orchestra’s music director for two busy years before a heart infection forced his sudden return to Vienna. His last two Philharmonic concerts were late in February 1911, when the main works were Beethoven’s Seventh and Mendelssohn’s Fourth. He died not quite three months later in Vienna at age 51.

Mahler made the Philharmonic (America’s oldest orchestra but not, before Mahler, as highly regarded as the Boston Symphony) a modern orchestra and a great one. And though Mahler was a controversial figure in New York, he was widely celebrated for his performances of Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” and Strauss’ “Don Juan,” all of which are on the orchestra’s tour under its current music director Kurt Masur. The other main work, Shostakovich’s Fifth, is a score unthinkable without the example of Mahler’s symphonies.

This connection to Mahler is, of course, a matter of great pride to the orchestra, but it may also seem farfetched that a Mahler Tradition could be maintained for 90 years. Certainly, the orchestra must have sounded very different under Mahler, and styles have changed considerably since his day. Besides that, many of us have been led to believe that Mahler wasn’t even a well-known name in music until Leonard Bernstein’s advocacy during the ‘60s.

But, in fact, the connection between Mahler and the New York Philharmonic is almost unbroken between the composer’s years in Manhattan and today. That is compellingly demonstrated by the orchestra’s lavish new 12-CD set of Mahler performances that are taken from radio broadcasts going back half a century.

“Mahler,” a retired horn player comments in the back of one of the two thick, spectacularly illustrated 250-page booklets boxed with the set, “was our composer-in-residence for the last 90 years.”

Incredible as it sounds, he was, and no other orchestra can make that claim.

*

For Mahler, New York was but a blip in the career of a famous conductor and composer. In Vienna, where Mahler had lorded over the Court Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, he was the dominant and domineering musical figure in the world’s music capital--its greatest conductor, its most advanced and controversial composer and the most important influence on its younger generation, including Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

But Vienna wore him down with its intrigues and its hostility to his symphonies. New York, where he first came in 1907 to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, promised less hassle and a lot more money, which Mahler hoped would allow him to devote more of his energies to composition. He had already been found to have a heart condition.

In New York, however, Mahler was little more than a glamorous foreign import for a status-conscious society that didn’t yet have Mercedeses to flaunt. For his part, he did not participate much in New York’s musical life the way he had in Vienna’s. He never learned English and required his players to speak German. He did not draw large audiences. He made enemies with some of the most important critics. He expressed little interest in American music or culture.

New York showed just as little interest in Mahler’s music. Although he wrote “Das Lied von der Erde,” his Ninth Symphony and the nearly complete sketches for a Tenth on his summer vacations back in Europe, he conducted only his First, Second and Fourth symphonies and some songs in New York.

But what the just-released boxed set demonstrates, through riveting performances or fascinating documentation, is that, from the 1920s on, nearly every music director of the New York Philharmonic has been a fervent champion of Mahler. Among them have been Mahler’s friend, Willem Mengelberg; his pupil, Bruno Walter; the fiery Greek Mahlerian, Dimitri Mitropoulos; and the first great British Mahlerian, John Barbirolli.

Toscanini was the exception, but Artur Rodzinski conducted Mahler, and Mahler was central to the programming of Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez. Leonard Bernstein became so infatuated with Mahler he sometimes felt that he had stepped into Mahler’s skin, and it was Bernstein who persuaded the world at large of Mahler’s greatness and importance.

This set, however, makes us realize just how ready the New York Philharmonic was for Bernstein’s Mahler. There are no Bernstein performances included. For those, we have access to commercial recordings (Sony is reissuing Bernstein’s exhilarating first Mahler cycle; Deutsche Grammophon has just reissued a splendid box of his later shamanistically spiritual performances).

But long before Bernstein, the Philharmonic was giving Mahler performances of note on a regular basis; indeed, since 1920, hardly a year has gone by that the orchestra has not programmed Mahler. Whereas in Europe, only the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, which Mengelberg headed for 50 years (1895-1945), maintained any kind of significant Mahler tradition, at least until the Nazi occupation and its ban on music by Jewish-born composers, which even Mengelberg, a Nazi sympathizer, could do little about.

Unfortunately, none of Mengelberg’s many Mahler performances in New York during the ‘20s was broadcast. The earliest performance, then, is a “Das Lied,” conducted at Carnegie Hall by Walter in 1948, a profoundly eloquent reading that features incomparably rich mezzo-soprano Kathleen Ferrier and fine tenor Set Svanholm. For some, the rarity of hearing Ferrier’s performance will be worth the rather hefty price of this set alone.

But there are numerous other attractions. Leopold Stokowski’s gloriously splashy performance of the gargantuan Eighth Symphony in 1950 was a major event, and although the broadcast has been widely distributed on foreign labels, it is good to have it now in the best possible sound. Mitropoulos’ Sixth from 1955 is excitable, searing. Barbirolli is fresh and lively in a 1959 First, and this first great British Mahlerian is also responsible for a supple, probing Ninth three years later, although not, perhaps, as deep a reading as the one he led with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a few months before his death in 1970.

Some surprises include an unusually lyrical Fourth from Georg Solti (1962), a particularly friendly version of the often disturbing Seventh from Rafael Kubelik (1981), a masterful Fifth from Klaus Tennstedt (1980), and an exhilarating Third from Boulez (1976), a symphony he has yet to record commercially.

Each of these performances has the air of a very alive live performance, and there is simply no other orchestra in the world that could have played these symphonies with such confidence or had the agility to respond so brilliantly to the different personalities of such conductors. Each is, in its own and in a different way, a great performance. (I don’t particularly respond to the Solti Fourth, but others are ecstatic over it.) And as an example of just how spectacularly the orchestra can play Mahler, there is Mehta’s Second. That concert, March 7, 1982, was the 10,000th given by the New York Philharmonic, and there was electricity in the air.

Taken together, this set offers a sense of the breadth of Mahler’s music that no compilation by a single conductor--the basis for all other sets--ever could. Still there is more. Included is the complete 106-minute radio program of interviews with Philharmonic orchestra musicians who played under Mahler that William Malloch made for Los Angeles FM station KPFK, in 1964.

We hear a lot of Mahler these days; we have the opportunity to know his music well. But this set brings us close to Mahler the man and to his tradition. It is a labor of archival and musical love and will only make the Mahler lover love Mahler more. *

* New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, conductor, Tuesday, 8 p.m., McCallum Theatre for the Performing Arts, 73000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert, $50-$80, (760) 341-1013; Friday, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $30-$85, (949) 553-2422; and Saturday, 8 p.m. Royce Hall, UCLA, (310) 825-2101. $19-$75.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

****

“The Mahler Broadcasts,

1948-1982”

The New York

Philharmonic

New York Philharmonic

Special Editions

The 12-CD box costs $225; it’s available at Tower Records and by contacting the New York Philharmonic, at Avery Fisher Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023, (212) 875-5000, or https://www.newyorkphilharmonic.org