Gulbenkian Orchestra opens season with Mahler 7.

This season's first concert of Lisbon's Gulbenkian Orchestra was an odd but interesting choice for a season opener. It featured two "difficult" works, Mahler's Symphony No. 7 (1905) and Geörgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna for 16 part a cappella choir (1966), I liked the pairing.

The opening Ligeti piece (familiar to many from its futuristic use in 2001 A Space Odyssey) is short, quiet, and atmospheric, made of many overlapping dissonances. It's very hard to sing (I performed it 15 years ago in the US), as you often have to come in solo on a long, exposed, high note, exactly matching the pitch of another singer who came in on the same note a bit earlier. So any hesitancy or inaccuracy is obvious. The Gulbenkian choir performed it well, with only a few soprano and tenor high A's entering shakily. The piece was performed in front of a black curtain behind the orchestra, with the invisible orchestra in the dark. This staging effectively set a nocturnal, spooky mood that should have transitioned well into the opening of the Mahler symphony. The conductor Lorenzo Viotti asked the audience not to applaud between the end of the Ligeti and the start of the Mahler, a great idea that enhanced the effect, and was nicely accomplished by the audience.

But I was disappointed that the opening of the symphony did not then maintain the nocturnal mood. The tenor horn opening solo, set to a funeral march rhythm, should seem distant, covered, eerie. Here it was far too loud and brassy sounding, spoiling the mood. The "in your face" playing was not what the composer intended by choosing this rarely used instrument. This from Wikipedia about the tenor horn, which lies between a French horn and a trombone in size:

The instrument's timbre...has little attack or resonance...[and typically has] very poor projection and power, and a characteristic "narrow-mellow" timbre...

This mellowness and limited projection caused Mahler to choose the tenor horn for the opening of this symphony, which typically features restraint and moodiness, not triumphal brass (the last movement is an exception). Overall the first movement was generally too loud and did not settle into the reserved, shadowy affect that Mahler intended.

In effective opening remarks, the Swiss conductor Antonio Votti called the symphony Mahler's most difficult to listen to and appreciate, for both audience and orchestra. Possibly true, but not an ideal way to prime the audience for the performance. I think that a principal reason for the difficulty is that Mahler rarely lets us settle into a theme or musical idea for long. A theme is usually interrupted quickly by something else. The net result is akin to a five movement musical version of a cubist painting, in which we are presented with many seemingly unrelated new surfaces and elements and are left to our own imagination to integrate them into a unified composition. Intriguingly, the first cubist paintings (eg Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) arrived two years later, in 1907.



Was Mahler a proto-cubist? We will never know, as he turned to other ideas in his last two symphonies and died soon thereafter, in 1911. Certainly this symphony is a steady diet of interruptions. The triumphal brass theme that opens the finale quicky builds to a big climax, but then is followed by a quirky rhythmic figure for woodwinds. The second movement march and third movement waltz both feature creepy Messiaen-like birds intruding in the distance to disrupt the rhythm. The fourth movement opens with a short violin solo that sounds like Tchaikovsky, but Mahler then mostly abandons it, rather than amplifying it as the Russian composer would have done. So the symphony is indeed a tough nut to crack, but I have grown to love it over the years.

This performance got better as it went along. The first two movements were generally too loud and unblended, but the orchestra and conductor settled in to Mahler's world better in the latter 3 movements. The rather bright acoustics of the hall did not help the orchestra, but I think these can be adjusted to with experience, since the orchestra achieved more timbral variety in later movements. Both the hall and the orchestra were at their best in the bright brassy moments in the finale. I hope the players can learn to also shine in more burnished, subtle moments. This would create an overall more satisfying performance of this challenging symphony.