As promised this past weekend the Pittsburgh Symphony played the second in their series of 90 minute symphony pieces: the Mahler 2 (e.g. Mahler’s Symphony number 2, nicknamed “Resurrection”). You did your homework right?
As with the Bruckner 8 before I picked up two tickets, one from my normal subscription where the seats on are on the floor, and another to be able to sit up in Family Circle to hear the whole thing again.
Worth it.
Also like the Bruckner shows, the Mahler opened with a relatively short piece: Boris Pigovat’s Yizkor, which the PSO commissioned in 2023. The piece was written to commemorate the five year anniversary of the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where 11 people were killed. The piece is an intense and devastating meditation on tragedy, violence, pain and sadness. It begins and ends with the entire viola section playing a long tune. At the end this tune comes from the prayer “El male rachamim”, from the Jewish memorial service for the dead. You can’t hear that music, in that context, without feeling a whole body chill.
Yizkor was good enough to almost overshadow the enormous piece that was going to follow it. Very well done. It also served as a fitting thematic prelude to the Mahler which after all is a musical treatise on life, death, the afterlife, and the forever glory of God and all that.
The Mahler starts with an extended funeral march in a deformed sort of sonata form. Like Bruckner there are a wide range of orchestral textures and colors, and some of those giant brass chorales. But the music is nothing like Bruckner at all. Bruckner plays like a somewhat static edifice that you just stand and admire. Mahler is more like a moving picture. Nothing ever stays still, instead it’s more like you hurdle from moment to moment, full of uncertainty, terror and doubt. To me it’s really a work that reflects the emotional the 20th century, even though it was written at the very end of the 19th.
The rest of the 90 minutes of the piece are made up of two shorter movements that are lighter in texture, then a fourth and fifth movement that take 40 minutes to get you to the end where you are face to face with the glory of the universe. The vocal stuff is in the fourth and fifth movements and we go from solo bits to a choir you can barely hear to a huge eruption from that same choir (shout out Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsurgh) leading into the final minutes where the whole band is going all out, complete with giant metal bells, two brass sections, double percussion and an organ. Mahler is the most heavy metal rock and roll music in the symphonic repertoire.1
All of this sounded great on Friday from the floor. It was even better up in Family circle on Sunday. From above you can both see and hear the music move around the orchestra and chorus: every solo, every intricate multi-layered texture, every drop to almost but not quite complete silence, and every time that brass section really lets it rip (both on stage and off stage!). They should take this record they are making and cut it up into a demo reel for orchestral dynamics just so people can know what they are missing out on. After hearing the thing live and really concentrating on it I can see why people get obsessed with this piece. There is so much always going on, you just want to sit through it all again to try and pick up more. 2
Sadly, some of these glories were interrupted by:
- Phones ringing and talking.
- Small children cooing with the chorus.
- Large metal thermos bottles falling on the floor.
- The general parade of the sick and otherwise diseased coughing their lungs out.
These shows were very very full, maybe the most full I’ve seen Heinz Hall for a non-movie show in the last few years. So this nonsense was inevitable I guess.
However, I feel it my duty as an older man yelling at clouds to complain about the general state of our world where grown-ass adults can’t even sit still in an orchestra concert for 90 minutes without their phone going off. Very sad. Truly a sign of our collective societal downfall.
But, maybe if our great society indeed dies out we’ll be lucky enough to live in Mahler’s world, and the power of God will resurrect us so we can sit in some concert of the future where we can get all the way from the start of this piece to the end of it without hearing someone’s iPhone receive a text message.
Dare to dream of it.
Notes
The two most obvious other candidates for most heavy metal classical music are both string quartets. Bartok and Shostakovich. There is also a great solo viola piece by Hindemith that’s pretty metal.↩︎
Along these lines one of the stranger episodes in the history of the Mahler 2 is the story of Gilbert Kaplan who had so much money and so much time on his hands after making that money that he spent much of his retirement learning to conduct this piece, playing it live several times, making two recordings of it, and also putting together a new authorized edition of the score. Opinions differ on whether his performances were/are any good. I have not heard them. “Very rich person rents entire orchestra to play favorite piece” is a thing that’s a bit too on the nose for our current days.↩︎