Gilbert finds new life in Mahler’s 9th

Alan Gilbert, 38, American, the well-connected son of two New York Philharmonic violinists, is a conductor on a very fast track. He’s working everywhere these days, getting noticed. Facing the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday night, he sank his teeth into Mahler’s deep, dark, death-struck Ninth Symphony and made it startlingly youthful.

This is a score that all but defined the symphony in the 20th century as a spiritual quest. Leonard Bernstein drew from it an anguished awareness of life leaving the body, the exquisite sensation of a time-bending final breath. Michael Tilson Thomas’ unforgettable Ninth with the San Francisco Symphony in Disney Hall last winter sounded practically like a dialogue with a composer from the beyond, as if Mahler’s last completed score might transcend death.

At Ojai three years ago, Pierre Boulez led the Philharmonic in the symphony, which Mahler completed shortly before his death in 1911, as a vision of the future, the promise of where music might go in a new century.

Carlo Maria Giulini’s fondly remembered performances of the work with the Philharmonic in the ‘70s and ‘80s were epically heartbreaking. Zubin Mehta found profundity in it in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion a few years ago by challenging the Philharmonic to play with surprisingly tender beauty. Kent Nagano jump-started his career two decades ago by stepping in for Seiji Ozawa with the Boston Symphony at the last minute and letting the Ninth speak with unforced eloquence.

The spectacle of Thursday’s Mahler was in the creamy richness and brassy boldness of the Philharmonic’s playing. All the instruments sounded as though they had gained a lot of weight. Gilbert is too ambitious and full of beans to have much patience for Mahlerian morbidity. Mahler had been diagnosed with a fatal heart disease when he wrote the symphony and had become nostalgic for the 19th century even as he was musically paving the way for the 20th. But this Mahler Nine seemed more about death from obesity and overindulgence.

Rather than drink in the pathos in the graceful first movement or wallow in it in the slow, haunted Adagio that ends the symphony, Gilbert reveled in the sounds of Mahler. He went to town in the central movements, turning minuet into burlesque and burlesque into mad Mardi Gras.

There is more to late Mahler than that, of course. No great composer was more obsessed with death than Mahler but less ready to die. If in the Ninth he uncomfortably uncovered his deepest conflicts between life and death, Gilbert came down on the side of the living. Even at the end of the symphony, when Mahler appears to have finally given up the struggle, where the most beautiful melodies in the world slow down to nothing but dying notes in the strings, Gilbert maintained too much tension for the life force to snap.

Occasionally, Gilbert may have pushed too hard, been too sure of himself. Although the Philharmonic played wonderfully for him, there were some surprisingly uncertain entrances, as if the players weren’t convinced he really wanted to go that far. But any such misgivings will undoubtedly have cleared up by this afternoon’s final performance.

Emotionally, Gilbert’s is anything but the last word on Mahler’s Ninth (it’s more like the first). But he leaves little question about his command of an orchestra or his technical control of complex musical thought, or about the places he himself is going.

He already holds three good jobs: chief conductor and artistic advisor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, principal guest conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony and music director of Santa Fe Opera.

Bigger posts loom. He is on the New York Philharmonic’s short list as successor to Lorin Maazel in 2009. He is developing strong relationships with the orchestras in San Francisco, Chicago and Cleveland. He reportedly wowed Berlin last month conducting the Deutsche Symphonie and substituting for an ill Bernard Haitink at the Berlin Philharmonic. Word has it that he has been selected to conduct John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” when it goes to the Metropolitan Opera in 2009.

I wonder whether the Chicago Symphony, which is searching for a successor to Daniel Barenboim, who departs in June, might not be the best fit for Gilbert. He got such a classic hearty Chicago sound from the Philharmonic on Thursday that it almost seemed as if the voices from the beyond on this occasion were those of Fritz Reiner and George Solti -- Reiner-like robust and Solti-like ferocious but without the overaggressiveness.

The important thing is that, wherever Gilbert goes, he’s got his sound. And it’s stirring.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 2 p.m. today

Price: $15 to $129

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com