Mester Finds the Modernity in Mahler’s Fifth

Is it a song of love or an ever-so-poignant summons of death? Or, perhaps, Mahler, so obsessive about both love and death, found the two so intertwined that he could not love without fearing its being taken away from him. Conversely, he often covered his fears of dying with honeyed sentiment.

This is one of the ambiguous dichotomies that lie at the heart of Mahler’s epic symphonies. And recent controversy about the Adagietto movement of his Fifth Symphony, performed as part of the Pasadena’s ongoing Mahler cycle Saturday night, has been a particular focus of the rift.

The movement is beautiful, still music for strings and harp, and it is often used to comfort the grieving. But five years ago, Gilbert Kaplan, the Wall Street publisher and Mahler enthusiast who has made a second career of conducting the Second Symphony, brought out a compact disc meant to show that Mahler intended the movement as a song of love, and that the modern tradition of playing it in a slow, somber fashion is all wrong. His performance, at Mahler’s tempos, lasted not quite eight minutes. In a 1987 recording, Leonard Bernstein took more than 11 minutes, and others have been slower since.

What would conductor Jorge Mester do? That was the question that the lecturer, Geoffrey Fontaine, left with those who attended his engaging preconcert talk at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. And it proved a cunning tease, since the remarkably fleet and exciting performance had so little to do with it.

For the record, Mester’s Adagietto clocked in at around eight and half minutes, which put him clearly on the side of love. But Mester’s performance seemed to be not about love or death, nor about all those other Mahlerian neuroses that have kept annotators in adjectives for years. Mester’s approach was, at once, classical and modern, but it was never romantic, never sentimental, never referential of extra-musical considerations.

Mester simply conducted the notes and the musicians. The classicism came in the way he proportioned the music, the logic of phrase leading to phrase, of section balancing section. There is more Mozart in Mahler than is often realized, and Mester found it. The modernity was in the execution, and that was quite startling.

Not having encountered the Pasadena Symphony for a decade, I was little prepared for the kind of virtuoso orchestra it has now become under Mester. And that virtuosity was much of the point of this performance, which became something of a concerto for orchestra, in the way much 20th century symphonic music is.

The orchestra may not have the lustrous tone of more famous (and more continually employed) orchestras, but the playing Saturday was unfailingly tight and accurate. There is much exposed music in Mahler, and he is especially hard on the brass. An occasional flub aside (they happen in the best of orchestras), there was never the sense that the players were being pushed beyond their capabilities, and Mester was pushing them hard. The fast movements, especially the wildly stormy second and the manic finale, were hair-raising.

Mester may not have answered any of the deep psychological questions that Mahler poses, but that was because he didn’t seem particularly interested in asking them. Yet by not asking, he told us much, including the fact that this symphony, which starts out so dark and ends so vibrantly, actually makes a great deal of musical sense if you just let it.