A few random thoughts of Mahler's music

I finished reading Norman Lebrecht's 2010 book, Why Mahler: how one man and ten symphonies changed the world yesterday, and have done a rather hastily-written review here, so I'm not going to repeat what I said.

I just wanted to make a few notes about my experience of Mahler over a long period of time, which admittedly has been entirely through recordings. I've never actually had the opportunity, as far as I recall, of seeing his work performed live.

The first time I heard anything by Mahler was when I bought a record of his Fourth Symphony through a record club I belonged to, back in the late fifties/early sixties. They'd post out their record of the month, and you could either keep it (and pay for it) or send it back and get something else, or just get nothing. Anyway, the symphony started with sleighbells. Odd. And then in the fourth movement a woman began singing, sweeping along with the orchestra at a great pace - Leonard Bernstein was the conductor.

Singing in a symphony? Well of course I was young and naive, and didn't know that having singers in a symphony was hardly new - Beethoven had done it way back in the Ninth, though I probably wasn't aware of that then, being only a callow teenager. (I was ignorant enough to have been astounded to hear from another piano player that Shostakovich was not only still alive but still writing symphonies.)

But Beethoven's Ode to Joy in the Ninth (a jolly little folk song he commandeered which drives me mad wherever I hear it) was nothing compared to the joyous and delightful singing in the Mahler. Mahler's own songs often made their way into his symphonies in some form or other, and if you know the songs you'll recognise them in the symphonies; or vice versa. He's a very self-referential composer, which makes you think, when you hear one of his symphonies for the first time, that you've heard bits of it before. You probably have. He seems to use ideas from one symphony to the next, and certainly his style is so peculiar to him that on hearing a piece of music you can often identify it as being his: there are phrases, mannerisms, ways of orchestrating things that appear again and again.

This is hardly unusual: many composers' "voices" are surprisingly unique, in spite of the fact that they're working with the same bunch of notes. Mozart is recognisable almost invariably, so too Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and dozens of others.

But Mahler is a little different. I remember Chesterton (I think it was) saying that the books of Charles Dickens were like chunks cut from one long cloth. They were full of Dickensian stuff; and even where he plans out his books more carefully, it's unfailingly Dickens. Mahler, to me, seems the same. It's as if he had one enormous symphony inside him and just chopped off an hour or so at a time for the next one.

That's a simplification, of course. As is the comment about Dickens. And yet both have an element of truth in them.

I was a bit surprised the other day to find that I had five of Mahler's symphonies on CD. Which means that I've listened to a lot more of his music than I'd thought (apart from what I've heard on the radio over many years). I don't have the Symphony of a Thousand (it's number 8), so watched this on You Tube yesterday. The wonderfully enthusiastic Gustavo Dudamel conducts a combined - and enormous - orchestra made up of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Four different choirs are involved, massed up and up beyond the orchestra on stands. (The youngest choir sings without music, and occasionally you see one of them turn to another and maybe tell them they've sung something wrong, or else one spies the camera and gives a grin.)  Apparently there are 1400 people involved. Crikey. There are seven soloists as well.

Mahler seems to have delighted in going for the extreme. In at least one other of his symphonies (no 2, the Resurrection) he lists out the instrumentation required, then adds, as the score progresses, twice as many of this and six more of those, as though musicians would suddenly appear out of the woodwork during the course of the performance. I'd love to see it happen, but it's probably not going to.

I don't know whether Mahler's Symphonies changed the world. Certainly hearing the 4th for the first time was a delightful surprise, but did it change my world? Possibly, but not in a way that made me turn direction. I still get a lump in my throat at hearing the singing beginning her song in it, but then music of all sorts does that. Listening to Mahler's 2nd Symphony the other day, which also has a large choir and soloists, I got all emotional when the choir came in, super-super softly, and just sang about the life after death, about being raised from the dead. Does it change my world? Well, I don't know, but it certainly adds to it.

Fiction/non-fiction

We've watched a couple of DVDs over the last few days.  One of these was The Way Back, which is supposed to be based on a true story of a group of escapees from a prison camp in Siberia during the Second World War three of whom managed to make it to India finally, by walking all the way.  When I say 'supposed' apparently there's a bit of argy-bargy gone over over the years as to how much truth and how much invention is contained in the original book on which the movie is based.  And then, of course, the movie makes some changes of its own.

Be that as it may, this movie, directed by Peter Weir, is surprisingly engrossing, especially considering that it's over two hours long and for a good deal of that time the characters are walking.  Yup, walking. Naturally, other stuff happens within that, and there are inter-relational things that go on, especially when the group of men is joined by a young girl who seems to be the only one capable of getting their histories out of them.  The main character, Janusz, played by Jim Sturgess (who kept reminding me of Sam Worthington of Avatar fame for some reason) is cast in the heroic mould: not only is it his intention to find the wife who betrayed him, he also wants to bring forgiveness to her.  But beside that underlining aim, he's also the one who has the endurance and determination and skills to keep going, and to assist the others to struggle on.  Of course some don't make it - we know that only three will survive because of a note at the beginning of the movie - but that doesn't stop us being involved with their journey; the adjective 'intrepid' barely covers it.  The cast includes Ed Harris as a grizzly old American caught up in the War - he's excellent - and Colin Farrell as a Russian criminal who only gets to come along because he has a very sharp knife.  Farrell does one of his wild man performances, and covers his natural intelligence under a guise of feral survival instincts.  He's excellent too.  Saoirse Ronan, who was only 16 at the time she made the movie, brings her wonderful waif presence to her role, and, for a time, becomes the centre around which the movie moves forward.

The characters walk through Siberian forests in blizzards, over mountains in the sunshine, out into the Siberian Desert where they nearly get cooked to death, up into Tibet (snow again), and finally to India, where the women are picking tea.  The photography is superb, and the things the actors themselves have to go through in the performance of their roles is sometimes almost beyond the call of duty.   I picked this movie up at the Library without knowing anything about it.  It was well worth getting.

The other film is a documentary called The Promise of Music.  Directed by the German, Enrique Sánchez Lansch, with a German film crew, this movie looks at a number of aspects relating to El Sistena, the system used in Venezuela to teach children music and bring them into a place where they're a contributing member of a proper orchestra.  It's publicly funded in that country, and the idea is now spreading further afield, both England and Scotland have begun to use it.  It has a deeper purpose that 'just' music-making; it aims to help youngsters from poverty areas to gain a good foothold in life and get themselves out of the poverty net.  As a result, in Venezuela it was under the Social Welfare area of the Government, rather than the Cultural one.  

While this movie looks in some degree at the process of El Sistena, it focuses more on some members of the Simón Bolivar Orquesta Sinfónica and its young conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, a lively and impassioned man who began his musical career as a violinist but quickly realised that conducting was his true love, and forte.  At the beginning the Orchestra (who also appear in the video on the Scottish version of El Sestina) is in the late stages of rehearsal for a concert in Bonn, where they'll play, amongst other things, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.  We travel with them to Bonn and see part of the concert - though if you go to another section of the disc you can see the entire concert, including the wonderful piece at the end in which they truly let their hair down, Venezuelan-style.  This is only one of the many heart-warming moments: another is when several of the children's orchestras combine together to perform Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, with Dudamel conducting.  

But apart from the music performances, there are a number of interviews with various members of the orchestra showing how they came up through the ranks, how they feel about El Sestina, what it's like to be part of such an organisation, and much more.  These are often entertaining, as the young people, mostly in their early to mid-twenties, are a delight, though they take their music very seriously.