Mahler, Made Fast and Light

It would be interesting to discover just what Roger Norrington was thinking Tuesday night, when he conducted his curious performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony to open the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s subscription series at the Hollywood Bowl. Often we do know what is on his mind, because he eagerly addresses the audience, as he did at the Philharmonic’s Brahms Experience last season. And often it’s a mix illuminating the historical circumstances of the music, with his own narrative fantasies.

With Mahler, and particularly this Second Symphony, Norrington has met his fanciful match. But the conductor said nothing as the lights went down, a strong moon shone on an idyllic night, and picnickers scrambled to stash the remains of dinner and perhaps strategize where to fit in a little cake during a concert without intermission. Certainly there was time for a remark or two to settle the large crowd into the mood of Homeric death and momentous resurrection that Mahler sometimes said was the subject of his massive symphony. After all, Norrington got through it in little more than 75 minutes. Ninety minutes is not uncommon for other conductors, and Leonard Bernstein could stretch beyond that.

Three times Mahler offered programs for a symphony that begins with a heroic funeral march and ends with chorus, soprano and contralto singing of glorious redemption, but he kept none (not even the symphony’s title, “Resurrection,” was Mahler’s). “I’m quite sure that if God were asked to draw up a program of the world he created he could never do it” was Mahler’s typically immodest analogy.

But Norrington’s supple, near neoclassical account hints at something else, perhaps more biographical. The young Mahler began this symphony during an awkward love affair with the wife of the grandson of famous Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber, whom Mahler had admired greatly.

Mahler needed to extract himself from the affair, and it has been suggested by biographers that the original version of the first movement, the tone poem “Todtenfeier,” (Funeral Rites)--which the Philharmonic performed last season--was, in fact, Mahler’s way of extinguishing those adulterous fires. Follow this thinking a bit further and it could explain the lines Mahler added, about triumphing over “love’s fierce strivings,” to the Resurrection chorale at the end.

Such conjectures may offer an explanation for Norrington’s strikingly single-minded and almost antiheroic performance, with its unprecedented speed and lightness of touch. Mahler attempted to fill the stage with the largest orchestra and the loudest sounds any composer had yet imagined (he infuriated his timpanists, who repeatedly broke their sticks trying to thunder as loud as Mahler insisted). He filled the score with an enormous range of passions, spiritual and sensual.

Norrington did not take the time to realize that range. Where many conductors view the symphony through a microscope, amplifying the individual emotions of details, Norrington’s is more telescopic, taking in the symphony’s larger sweep. One phrase seemed to answer another almost as formally as in Haydn, and the music had a forward momentum as strong as Beethoven. Negotiating Mahler’s instrumental hairpin turns, and his sudden changes of tempos and dynamic shifts (both of which Norrington closely observed), also required a lighter than usual sound. It helped the ensemble that Norrington reseated the orchestra, with the violins divided, as had been the practice in the late 19th century when the symphony was written.

And so the symphony came to seem more of the moment than momentous, to sound more like a man struggling with life than with death. Some of this was the result of Norrington’s sense of theater, which is sure. In the last movement there is a march of terror followed by a cry in the wilderness, with the sounds of horn and trumpets in the distance. A flute in the foreground is the bird of death, as Mahler described it in one of his programs.

Norrington used the space of the Bowl with great imagination here, bringing the symphony sonically into three dimensions (and the amplification system worked well enough to make this vivid). But the outdoor surround-sound also made the effect more pastoral than apocalyptic, further enforcing a more personal than religious slant on the symphony.

The performance itself also strayed away from epochal thoughts. The orchestra kept up with Norrington, and often thrillingly so, but never easily, and that, too, made this seem more human than superhuman music. The contralto for the brief song of the fourth movement and in the finale was the superb Anna Larsson, sounding splendidly earthy and clear. Janice Chandler was the souring soprano at the end. The Los Angeles Master Chorale seemed muted, and one suspects that is the way Norrington, keeping everything in its place, wanted it.