The Song of the (Unsettled) Night
Mahler’s rarely heard Seventh is for many an ugly duckling, but for others a connoisseur’s delight.
For 84 minutes his giant forces hammer away, reflecting I believe the foment of the times (1905) and the breakdown of the old world order. Here Mahler puts aside his elegant opera-night chapeau and gets into the sonic nitty-gritty, bristling with abrasive exuberance while falling in love with dissonance and inner-orchestral conflicts.
The Viennese composer is troubled, he is pessimistic, he unreels those dour funereal marches. In this area however he is brilliant, with myriad modes of expression. However improbably, the devotees were enkindled; concluding the Saturday night performance by the S.F. Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, without even a refreshing intermission, a five-minute ovation broke out, the longest I can recall in years.
This is a Seventh Symphony that is, if not unruly, at least a mite disheveled. Marching to a different drummer right from the start, Mahler brings on a wakeup call: the rarest of solos by a Wagner tuba (tenor tuba) with a “wrong note” falling interval signaling unorthodoxies yet to come. He maintains an undercurrent of great restlessness through the five movements, with night music, a scherzo, a limping little waltz and two sturdy bookend movements of high energy. Conductor MTT does not shy away from angry jangling tones. Mahler’s augmented ensemble calls for augmentations like four trombones, six horns, five percussionists, two harps. He gets raucous sounds from “bells-up” French horns, then bass drum, wild timpani, and bells (both tubular ones and cowbells) in the rambunctious finale.
The orchestra impressed through the long siege, and the pace never lagged. This is clearly the Mahler era of the SFS, as the Ninth comes up in June, and a year hence we get the roof-blowing “Symphony of a Thousand” when MTT is ending his illustrious tenure. No challenge appears to be beyond the capacity of this orchestra.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E Minor (“Song of the Night”), played by the San Francisco Symphony under MTT, heard May 16. For SFS info: (415) 864-6000 or go online.
