Classical Music Review: Ives and Mahler: Two Kindred Spirits

Stefan Janciw, violin and Jeremy Denk, piano

Town Hall, Manhattan

April 22, 2018

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Mariss Jansons, conductor

Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in

Carnegie Hall

May 5, 2018

Austrian Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and American Charles Ives (1874-1954) each wrote fascinating music that bridges older traditions to the emerging twentieth century. While their music sounds very different, they share a common fascination with using the sounds of the real world in their music, and in overlapping multiple tunes in innovative ways. 

Mahler is quoted as saying “The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.”, while Ives opined “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole”. Mahler said once that he used “common” quotations in his music as a way of portraying the subconscious (this was the era of Freud); when a mother hears an organ-grinder playing outside after the death of her child that song may become forevermore associated with that sad event. Each composer was a maverick. Ives flopped at traditional conservatories and was fired as an organist for playing too many modernistic “wrong notes” during the hymns (Bach had the same problem). Mahler was a wildly successful conductor but struggled to sell his symphonies to the conservative Austrian public and critics. Each responded by composing on the side, Ives funded by his successful insurance business, Mahler by his spectacular conducting career. Their compositions juxtapose hymns, marches, jingles, peasant dances, bird calls, cow bells…you name it. While neither went as far as Schoenberg and others who scrapped tonality, they certainly pushed tonality to its limits, overlapping tonal melodies to create exciting near-cacophony. Mahler and Ives both worked in New York around 1910, and there is evidence that Mahler knew the other’s music, but there is no known correspondence between them. I wish there were. They would have had a lot to share, and their visions on the direction of music seem sympatico. That is one of those imaginary lunch dates that I would gladly host!

Two recent concerts made me thing about how they each contributed to the nascent twentieth century music scene. The fascinating recital by Stefan Janciw and Jeremy Denk covered all four Violin Sonatas by Ives, each written between 1902-1915. The performers emphasized the hymn/popular song basis of each by having the tunes sung by a male quartet (sadly wobbly and often out of balance) so we could be familiar with the thematic basis of the sonatas. I was mostly unfamiliar with these wonderful works, and they exhibit characteristic Ives wittiness, emotional range, and thematic interplay. Typical devices were the largo of Sonata 4, where the solemn river-side church hymns are interrupted by local kids throwing rocks in the water (i.e. dissonances, rhythmic chaos), followed by resumption of the service. In Sonata 2, a depiction of a Civil War veteran reunion, the violinist’s nostalgic meditations on “The Old Oaken Bucket that Hung in the Well” are briefly drowned out by the old soldiers marching by to “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching”. The drunken chaos of Sonata 2’s “In the Barn” was wonderful (listen to it played by Hilary Hahn here. Janiciw and Denk really had fun with this, as in having the drunken violinist slow and play out of tune to “Turkey in the Straw” (at about 6:17 on the Hahn recording). 

Denk’s verbal introductions were funny and helpful, and despite a number of conservative audience members departing at intermission, I found the whole concert illuminating and vastly entertaining. All four of these sonatas need to be performed regularly.  They transcend Ives’ reputation as just an oddball and support his status as one of the best American composers.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (1908) was written at exactly the same time as the Ives sonatas.  It is often termed “Song of the Night” because of the dusky movements 2-4 which evoke hooting birds and spooky forests. The first and last movements, however are quite different, and present more characteristic Mahler. Each movement uses a march as its core element. In movement one Mahler actually contrast two minor key marches, one slow (really a funeral march), one faster. Here is the famous opening funeral march for tenor horn (a darker sounding horn lying between horns and tubas in their range) which sets a typically ominous stage against rumbling strings. In the rondo-finale he then uses an upbeat march in Cmajor as the core of the movement that sounds a little like the old Mighty Mouse cartoon theme. Marches have fallen out of favor after the world wars, sad since they test a composer’s ability to write evocative funeral marches and upbeat triumphal music. Mahler loved them (marches are featured in his second, third, fifth, sixth and seventh symphonies) as did Ives (the song “Circus Band”, Three Places in New England, where multiple bands play different marches simultaneously). Mahler’s seventh is neurotic and typically Mahlerian in that triumph is never far from tragedy (the upbeat march in the finale alternates with episodes that are considerably darker or spooky, evoking the middle forest movements). The symphony never really lets you get your emotional bearings, rather like a nighttime walk through a dark forest.

The Carnegie Hall performance of this symphony by Mariss Jansons and his Munich-based orchestra was somewhat disappointing. Jansons, until recently also the conductor of the magnificent Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, truly emphasized each tree in the nocturnal woods, losing the forest as a result. 

Each of Mahler’s gestures and special effects seemed to have air-space around it, and Carnegie Hall seemed emptied of its traditional warm sound. Tempos were pretty standard, no faster than one could do to emphasize all this detail. While this clinical exactitude was impressive, and interesting as a study of the piece, it robbed the symphony of much of its atmosphere, spookiness, and neurosis. It seemed more of a statement of what a fine orchestra can do, rather than what it should do, and I do not think it served Mahler’s vision well. The long (90 minute) symphony seemed even longer as a result. I would like to hear this orchestra again with a different conductor. They sounded more crystalline, less bass-resonant and heavy compared to some of their Austrian and German competitors. I think their Debussy or Stravinsky could be terrific.  But this performance led by a famed conductor fell short.