OVERNIGHT REVIEW: Gustavo Dudamel and L.A. Philharmonic play Mahler's Symphony No. 6 at Walt Disney Concert Hall

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
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Los Angeles Philharmonic; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 6
Friday, January 27, 2012 • Walt Disney Concert Hall
Next performances: Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 2 p.m.
Information: www.laphil.com
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Of all of Mahler’s 9.5 symphonies (10.5, if you count Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony), No. 6 is probably the strangest (although some might vote for No. 7). At a glance the 6th looks like a traditional format — four movements with titles that read pretty much like standard symphonic fare — but when you hear it there’s not much traditional about how it plays out. The contrasts are formidable: lyrical one moment, then grotesque, then grandiose. It moves from weird to wonderful and back over 87 minutes (last night).

In some ways, Symphony No. 6 looks backward towards the 19th century of Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss; it also looks forward to what would come, including the atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, to the 20th and even the 21st centuries. During his preconcert lecture, Asadour Santourian quoted Mahler as saying that to understand the sixth symphony, you have to know the other five, so hearing it within the context of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Mahler Project” certainly fulfilled that requirement for many people. Nonetheless, I have never completely grasped the piece and still don't, even after a sweeping performance by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic last night.

Among the work’s intriguing aspects:
• Mahler began the piece in the summer of 1903, one of the happiest times of his life personally and professionally. Yet in the fourth movement he wrote of the downfall of his “hero” (and/or of himself) by inserting three massive hammer blows that were, as he later wrote, “on whom [the hero] falls three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.”

When he revised the work, Mahler omitted the third hammer blow as being too agonizing — some conductors play the work with two hammer blows, others with three (Dudamel reportedly rehearsed it with three yesterday morning but in last night’s performance omitted the third).

Incidentally, Mahler’s hammer is not a stick beating on a bass drum or timpani. The Phil’s mallet looks like it was pilfered from the “ring the bell” game at a carnival and it was pounded on a wooden box that measured about four feet long by four feet high and two feet deep — the percussionist had to mount steps to whack the top of the box.

• Mahler originally wrote the Scherzo as the second movement, then later reversed its order with the Andante. Throughout the subsequent century, conductors have performed the symphony following one order or the other. Last night’s printed program called for the LAPO perform it with scherzo followed by andante, Dudamel reversed the order and management added a slip sheet into the program to announce the change.

• The hammer is just one of a large number of percussion instruments that Mahler employs during the symphony. The list includes snare drum, tam-tam, triangle, xylophone, glockenspiel, two sets of cowbells (one onstage, the other offstage), offstage bells, two sets of timpani, and three pair of giant cymbals that at one point are played together. The work is also scored for two harps and two celestas.

As he has done throughout the cycle, Dudamel conducted without a score, but unlike other performances, this one emphasized propulsive energy rather than languid tempos. The Philharmonic was again in top form throughout the evening. For all of the massive fortissimo outbursts, what stood out for me was the Andante with luscious string sounds interspersed with exquisite solo work from Ariana Ghez, oboe; Carolyn Hove, English horn, Michelle Zukovsky, clarinet; and Andrew Bain, French horn.
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Hemidemisemiquavers:
• British author and columnist Normal Lebrech provides the preconcert lecture tonight and tomorrow. If his crowds approach those at his lectures on Tuesday and Thursday, plan on arriving early as those crowds in BP Hall were overflowing.
• The Simón Bolivár Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela continues the Mahler cycle on Tuesday with Symphony No. 7. The Phil returns next Friday and Sunday (Feb. 3 and 5) with Symphony No. 9 and both ensembles join eight soloists and more than 800 choristers at the Shrine Auditorium on Feb. 4 for Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand).
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(c) Copyright 2012, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.