Mäkelä, Concertgebouw deliver impassioned Schoenberg, remarkable Mahler at Carnegie
Love was in the air Saturday night at Carnegie Hall, as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, led by its chief conductor designate Klaus Mäkelä, cast its penetrating spotlight on two late-Romantic works rooted in forbidden passion.
Arnold Schoenberg was 25 when a poem about a love triangle (or rectangle, if you count the baby growing inside the woman) inspired what is still his most frequently performed piece, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet, later arranged by the composer for string orchestra.
Gustav Mahler was all of 24 when an unrequited love prompted both his “Wayfarer” songs and ideas for a symphony based on them. Four years later, the collapse of his affair with another, married woman—the granddaughter-in-law of Carl Maria von Weber, no less—sent him dashing to his writing desk to finish his Symphony No. 1.
Conductor Mäkelä, 28, delivered these end-of-an-era masterpieces in all their glory and desperation, aided by a band of musicians capable of making music jump off the printed age in ways rarely heard in these parts.
Performing a piece for six players with an orchestra of dozens has risks: a loss of focus in the sound, or less lively interplay among the parts. There was no such falling-off in the Concertgebouw string sections, however—only a fierce unity of purpose and clarity of tone as they evoked Schoenberg’s night scene in the forest and the whipsaw emotions that the poet Richard Dehmel crammed into a mere 36 lines: the woman’s confession of carrying another man’s child, her shame and yet her longing for motherhood, the suspense as she awaited her lover’s response, his glowing declaration of love for her and the child.
This was scandalous stuff for 1899, but Schoenberg saw in it a Tristan-like drama, fit for the most Wagnerian chromatic harmonies. The Concertgebouw players negotiated the ever-shifting modulations with assurance as they mirrored the conductor’s eager, sweeping gestures in sound. Forest noises whispered, passionate tremolos shuddered. A solo sextet exchanged intimacies. Deep, resonant tutti made the woods ring with affirmation. All was executed on curves of expression that came together in one long arc, reproducing the cinematic focus-in and pull-back of Dehmel’s poem.
Composed a decade earlier than Verklärte Nacht, Mahler’s First Symphony also opens in a hushed natural scene, but with slightly unsettling signs of human activity: bugle calls from a distant military camp, and the call of the cuckoo, that mocker of illicit lovers. Mahler returned to this score again and again to simplify and clarify its textures; on Saturday, Mäkelä and his players honored that intention to the maximum, projecting Mahler’s novel instrumental doublings and sound effects with laser-like clarity in every dynamic from ppp to fff. The orchestra’s sections, be they dancing horns or chirping woodwinds, were always exquisitely tuned.
Shaping a first-movement scene of ever-increasing youthful exuberance, Mäkelä danced, swayed and dipped, or snapped to attention at the more driven moments, as if remembering those soldiers in the distance. The performance’s finely etched details never sapped its forward momentum, which carried the music through soft episodes and loud to a bracing finish.
The heavy-handedness of the lumbering Ländler movement came from Mahler, not Mäkelä, but the latter might have found a moment or two of relief from all that aggressiveness and sarcasm. He also doubled down on a queasy, draggy trio section—questionable choices (though executed superbly as always) for a movement the composer characterized as “full sail,” especially as even more sarcasm awaited in the parody funeral scene of the third movement.
That solemn procession, thought to have been inspired by a woodcut depicting “The Hunter’s Funeral,” with animals walking behind the casket, marched to the muffled strains of a slowed-down “Frère Jacques,” as bird calls from clarinet and flute piercingly mocked the deceased animal-killer. Before the mourners disappeared in the distance, Mahler slipped in a few bars of Jewish cafe music, as if evoking his own uneasy status in Catholic Vienna. Mäkelä did not miss a detail of this subtly changing movement, allowing the listener to perceive and process its shifting moods.
The all-stops-out, chaotic scene that opened the last movement was delivered with Berlioz-like hardness and clarity, the better to frame the upward-striving, graceful but not sentimental string passages that followed. While pursuing the twin Beethovenian goals of recapitulating earlier movements and driving through dissonance to D major triumph, the Concertgebouw players always had matters well in hand, and the pianissimos were as gripping as the fortissimos.
Their mastery brought the capacity audience to its feet at the close, as Mäkelä returned four times to the stage, indicating individual players and each section of the orchestra to stand and bask in the applause. As the house lights came up and the audience filed slowly out, the players on stage talked excitedly and embraced each other, a sign of what success in this hall means to musicians everywhere.
Carnegie Hall presents the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Semyon Bychkov, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, in music by Dvořák and Smetana, 8 p.m. Dec. 3. carnegiehall.org
4 Responses to “Mäkelä, Concertgebouw deliver impassioned Schoenberg, remarkable Mahler at Carnegie”
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Posted Nov 24, 2024 at 3:05 pm by CastaDiva
I agree with this well written review. I was at the sold out performance, and enjoyed every moment of it.
Posted Nov 25, 2024 at 8:37 am by Bern
Caught them at the KenCen last night…different program (Prokofiev, with Lisa Batiashvili tearing it up, Rachmaninoff, and the brilliant revelation Ellen Reid) – all in all, one of the 2 or 3 finest performances I’ve attended. And yes, many call backs and a couple encores, and the musicians embracing long after the final notes faded…
Posted Nov 25, 2024 at 10:35 am by christian Steiner
To my regret I was not at the concert.
It seems the world has another STAR the likes of Carlos Kleiber. How wonderful.
Posted Nov 27, 2024 at 3:24 am by Medi Gasteiner
Great! Mäkelä is THE young conductor of today, saw him in 7 different places from Vienna to Bucarest Enescu Festival. Would have loved to be at wonderful Carnegie Hall!