Nézet-Séguin, Philadelphia Orchestra twine music of grief and loss by Heggie, Mahler

Grief and loss are constant elements of human existence, along with the larger losses to society that come from horrors like mass shootings, pandemics, and environmental catastrophes that are becoming a common part of contemporary life.
We all have to deal with them and meet them eventually. And perhaps in the meantime we find what we need to deal with these tragedies in poetry, meditation, even physical activity.
Although it’s merely a niche in our culture, classical music has the most important and humane response to these tragedies, large and small. Much of this comes from the circumstances of history, that life was far shorter and often far more brutal through past centuries than before advances in medical technology and the brief mid-20th century pause in wide-scale wars. The music was made within that context, often responding to the surrounding carnage.
One of the greatest works about grief and loss— literally about facing death—is Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, which the composer never heard, dying at age 50. The Philadelphia Orchestra, with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, played the Ninth at Carnegie Hall Wednesday night, with an apt, moving contemporary companion, Jake Heggie’s 2020 vocal piece Songs for Murdered Sisters.
While Mahler’s symphony is slightly on the abstract and philosophical side, Heggie’s piece is wrenchingly personal. Written for baritone and orchestra and sung by Joshua Hopkins, it is a response to the 2015 murder of Hopkins’ sister Nathalie Warmerdam, and two other women, at the hands of an ex-partner, and the text comes from poetry Margaret Atwood (who has also lost friends to domestic violence) wrote that was later collected in Dearly: New Poems.
The result is transformational. On a technical level, Heggie’s simple, graceful melodies and harmonies, and clear, delicate orchestration, heard through Hopkins’ warm, mellifluous singing, turned Atwood’s mundane words into the loveliness and complexity of song. Yet they seemed to take the unimaginable pain of the murders into something that could hold and display the insoluble emotions of it all in a place that could be controlled by both Hopkins and the listener. There was a wonderful precision in the music and the performance, the ability to show something important and also dangerous with transparency and honesty, while being the master of it. Far more than the pop-psychological notion of closure, this is how people can hope to carry grief, which never goes away.
In the Ninth Symphony, Mahler examines death from an internal, personal view. Through the music, Mahler sees the end and wrestles with fear, rage, manic exaltation, and finally peace. It is a test of musicianship, not just technically but artistically.
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance was solid Wednesday night, at times excellent, but not completely satisfying. Nézet-Séguin had a strong handle on form, pace, and especially the proportional durations between the first and last moments, which are fundamental to this work. But many small details, and one large one, were off.
For the former, the kind of specific and varied accents, articulations, 16ᵗʰ-note rests, and the like were not as nuanced or crisp as they needed to be. The playing was committed but, as is often the case with this conductor, passion overcame exactitude. There wasn’t enough spring in the second movement Ländler, and the cross-rhythms in the Rondo-Burleske were a little soupy. While the transition from the strange bass clarinet solo to the return of the main theme in the first movement was excellent, there was insufficient tension built up within the first three movements.
The larger issue is that though this orchestra has a beautiful sound—and the woodwind section was full of wild character—it doesn’t really have a Mahler sound. Their burnished, dusky color captures part of Mahler’s quality but not all of it. Balances were excellent but the overall range of timbres never reached the sunny brightness that marks out one range of the composer’s expression. His music has the most extreme emotional range of perhaps anything ever composed, and the Philadelphia sound doesn’t convey all of it.
That being said, the sound was ideal for the final movement, which starts at sundown and moves into deeper—yet somehow warmer—darkness. This movement was marvelous, beautiful, with absolutely gorgeous playing and palpable, powerful, aching feelings. Concertmaster David Kim’s solos were stunning, with a driving yet unadorned sound that felt like a connection to the first half. While not an ideal performance, this Ninth did have an ideal conclusion.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti perform music of Bellini, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky, 8 p.m. Tuesday, January 21. carnegiehall.org