Mahler’s 2nd with MTT, LSO and LSC, Alice Coote and Siobhan Stagg (20.10.24)
As MTT stepped out onto the stage and the audience erupted into applause, I could already feel emotional. Earlier this year, I made an off the cuff decision to purchase tickets to see Sunday’s performance without thinking about logistics. 2024 would usher in MTT turning 80 (in 2021, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma). I spent the late 90s-early 2010s seeing him conduct with the SFS and collecting his recordings with my late mother. There was a lot of nostalgia and memory attached to the event and it was building up to the moment he walked up to his stand, turning to us, the audience with a smile and saluting with his baton.
Mahler and MTT have become synonymous over the last three decades and I’ve only become semi-familiar with Mahler through the Keeping Score documentaries. MTT has been devoted to delivering Mahler’s ingenious craft through his entire career and so I knew we would be part of something special. Jonathan and I have listened to the “Resurrection” symphony on our own, read the pamphlet’s take—though nothing could prepare us for how immense, how powerful, how intense this piece of work is.
Mahler’s 2nd features an over-100 symphony (we’re talking every section was doubled: two timpani’s and eight double basses! not to mention, off-stage percussion and trumpets) and an over-100 LSO chorus so if you can picture it, the stage was completely filled out. It consists of 5 movements with the final divided into 3 subsections—it has 26 parts, took Mahler 6 years to compose and has a duration of 90 minutes. A wonderful quote from Mahler himself that there is no necessitation in explaining the “meaning of his Second symphony”; that he “was in no way concerned with the detailed setting…but rather of a feeling.”
A feeling?! More like a vast, dizzying array of all the feelings that human beings are capable of experiencing yet can’t quite make out. Mahler’s music is abstract, hard to describe, occasionally baffling so personally by movement:
I. With serious and solemn expression throughout: my favourite. I love the introduction of the nervous string tremolo with the double basses and cellos bringing forth the grim motif. Mahler has a thing for funeral marches but this is no funeral march you or I are familiar with. It’s dark, relentless and what a way to throw an audience into what feels like water rapids in the deep unknown.
II. Very moderate, never rushing: it’s a waltz! Kind of. If you watched TSoM, it would remind you of the Ländler (that pinnacle of romance!) and it’s a bit of light and hope contrasted against that fore-bearing introduction.
III. Calmly flowing: this bit is sarcastically jolly; brightness with an edge. It ends abruptly and jarringly.
IV: Very solemn but simple, like a chorale: mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is a powerhouse! she’s got such timbre and projection. She blew soprano Siobhan Stagg out the water later on.
V. Scherzo tempo: in a wild outburst: the finale has three sections bookmarked by moments of absolute stillness. You could hear a pin drop in the hall, that was how quiet those pauses were. Here were the off-stage horn and percussion calls and each time, the orchestra would swell a bit more than the previous until the chorus joins in, then the soprano and mezzo-soprano. As the entirety builds up to its final climax like Hansel’s Messiah complete with the sound of chimes as church bells, you could see the audience perching on the edge of their seats. The end is coming and you’re just waiting for that ultimate culmination of triumph—gates of heaven opening, there’s the resurrection.
The moment that last note was breathed, played, let loose into the atmosphere of the hall, the audience erupted into a 10 minute standing ovation. I felt like crying again because it was just pure respect and adoration pouring out into that hall. It felt like the world showed up for MTT; in that diverse audience of young and old, locals and internationals, no one wanted it to end (an encore after Mahler wouldn’t be right). MTT had a chair but he never really sat in it. The fervour of his conducting has toned down a bit but it didn’t lack the vibrancy to carry this enormous, massive work through to its end. He would do this again on Wednesday night, as I overheard another audience member preen about the fact he was coming to the Barbican again.
I don’t know if I’ll see MTT conduct again, which made Sunday night feel once in a lifetime to me and that I had the opportunity to share my love for classical music, a piece of my old home, San Francisco via MTT with my other half—it does bring a lot of emotions to the forefront. Life has been gruelling—Jonathan and I work in difficult settings. But as artist and writer Charlie Mackesy once said, “These notes can thread together to heal a broken heart.”
