First-class programming has been a trademark of the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti’s artistic direction. Mahler’s Song of the Earth was no exception – here the title work was preceded by two others that provided us with many points of musical and historical cross-reference.
The concert opened with Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, the best known and certainly most successful small-scale work to have emanated from a composer who was otherwise the master of the very large. Wagner is of course the musician whose creative force and musical innovations haunted his European successors in the same way Beethoven haunted those who composed after him. Written as a birthday gift to his second wife, Cosima, the Siegfried Idyll is so called because it also celebrated the couple’s third child, Siegfried, born the previous year, although it also includes many thematic quotations associated with the eponymous hero of the latter half of his Ring Cycle. Originally scored for chamber ensemble of 13 players, Wagner later expanded it when he had the work published commercially. Here, however, the ACO presented it in its original form. A complex, delicate, work, saturated with ambiguous hamonic movement, it is not easy to perform. Both the crystal-clear acoustics of the Melbourne Recital Centre and Tognetti’s constrained use of vibrato in particular tended to make the odd momentary lapse in ensemble or intonation more obvious than they might otherwise have been.
Today, many no doubt know the name of Alma Mahler-Werfel principally through the horrendously politically incorrect (but admittedly still funny) song Alma by Tom Lehrer. Written in 1965, after he had read her obituary in the New York Times the previous year, the song made much of her marriages (two more after Gustav) to many of the great creative minds of her day. But those minds also recognised Alma’s brilliance in turn. Infamously, however, Gustav Mahler had made it a condition of marriage that she must forego her own compositional ambitions in favour of his (Alma had studied composition with Alexander Zemlinsky).
The three songs programmed: “Laue Sommernacht (Otto Julius Bierbaum); “Die stille Stadt” (Richard Dehmel); and “Bei dir ist es traut” (Rainer Maria Rilke), were presented in orchestrated versions by British composer David Matthews. All were composed before Alma met Mahler. They are substantial compositions from such a young voice, demonstrating that she had a precocious command of post-Wagnerian musical rhetoric and genuine literary flair. When Arnold Schoenberg later heard some of her songs in Vienna, he wrote to her to praise her talent and lament that she “did not continue that work” as it would “certainly have led somewhere”. Indeed, this music cannot but convey a sense of “what might have been”.
Alma did, however, later support Schoenberg and others of the Viennese avant garde. One of the ways that Schoenberg had himself worked to promote new music was through his Society for Private Music Performances in Vienna, and it was for that vehicle in 1921 that he had started working on a scaled down scoring of Mahler’s orchestral song cycle for tenor and mezzo soprano Das Lied von der Erde. Schoenberg reduced the orchestral forces to string and wind quintets, adding three keyboard instruments: piano, celesta, and harmonium, and retaining three percussionists. When the society collapsed the same year, however, he abandoned the project, it eventually being completed by Rainer Riehn in 1980.
Even scaled down, however, the orchestration still presents an ensemble challenge for the soloists. Both tenor Stuart Skelton and mezzo Catherine Carby struggled at times to be heard over the ensemble texture, even though both are also blessed with powerful voices. Mahler’s vocal writing also places particular demands on the tenor soloist and here Skelton’s voice did sound strained on occasion. But these were impressive performances nonetheless, the ACO delivering characterful work and the soloists showing full commitment to the text. Carby’s delivery of the final movement, Der Abschied (The Farewell) was especially powerful.
I suspect the whole experience could have been improved, however, by surtitles. The texts Mahler sets, free German translations of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems, are both long and rich in metaphors and it really helps to be fully aware as to what is being sung at all times (especially when it was also not always easy to hear the German text over the orchestra).
The generous program booklet included an essay by playwright Daniel Keene that boasted that he had “never attended a live performance of Mahler’s work. My encounter with his music will be a solitary affair: my concert hall a pair of headphones, the presence of my orchestra something imagined”. But, as the recent films Tàr and Maestro demonstrate, and as this concert amply demonstrated at its conclusion, this is music supremely for performance, the act of realising the score becomes here a vision of consecrated music-making, no less.
This concert, currently touring nationally, will be repeated at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Wednesday May 22 at 7.30pm, and at Hamer Hall on Sunday May 26 at 2:30pm
Photo credit: Nic Walker
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Peter Tregear reviewed Mahler’s “Song of the Earth”, presented by the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall on May 13, 2024.
