Join the New World Symphony family in celebrating our Co-Founder and Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). Gustav Mahler’s symphonies have changed the way we think of music. And MTT is changing the way we hear them. Six of his 12 Grammy Awards celebrate his explosively fresh interpretations of these symphonic masterpieces. Encounter extraordinary expression by MTT’s side as he explores Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a rich panorama of life showcasing tender bereavement and beautiful jubilation. Gil Shaham shares the vigor and beauty in fellow virtuoso violinist Joseph Boulogne’s Ninth Concerto. 

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Program

Joseph Boulogne

Concerto No. 9 in G major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 8 (c. 1775)
Approximate duration: 22 minutes

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a champion fencer before his 20th birthday. He was also a renowned boxer, dancer and marksman, but his real love was music, and his prowess with the violin allowed him to become the leader of a powerhouse orchestra in Paris and a personal instructor to Marie Antoinette.

Boulogne’s French father owned sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and he amassed incredible wealth through the forced labor of enslaved Africans, including the woman who gave birth to the future star of French music. Going against the code that normally would have passed enslaved status from mother to son, Boulogne was raised openly as his father’s child, and from the age of 13 he received the finest aristocratic education available in France.

Seeing a rise in popularity of his published sheet music, Boulogne composed this Violin Concerto in G major as his Opus 8, adding to a catalog consisting mostly of violin concertos as well as contributions to the sinfonia concertante genre. This Concerto exemplifies the clear and balanced aesthetic of the early Classical period, rooted in a combination of songlike phrasing and instrumental virtuosity. The slow movement, set in a minor key, is exceptionally heartfelt and vulnerable, and the rondo finale uses that episodic structure brilliantly, setting up each return of the distinctive three notes that begin the main theme. Musicians of Boulogne’s day took note of this rich and mature style of concerto discourse, perhaps none more than Mozart, who must have known Boulogne through scores even before a pivotal visit to Paris in 1778 when he got to see this astonishing violinist-composer in action.  

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 5 (1901-02)
Approximate duration: 68 minutes

Gustav Mahler began his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901, a few months after nearly dying from an intestinal hemorrhage. By the time he returned to his summer villa to complete the Symphony in 1902, his world had turned much rosier: He had met and married Alma Schindler, and she was expecting their first child. Mahler tinkered with the Symphony’s orchestration until the premiere performance, which he conducted in October 1904 in Cologne, and he continued to make various changes in the following years. Reflecting later about his struggles to perfect the Fifth Symphony, he wrote, “Clearly the routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies had deserted me altogether, as though a totally new message demanded a new technique.”

Mahler’s first four symphonies drew much of their energy from vocal music, with the first quoting Lieder melodies and the next three incorporating actual singers. With the Fifth Symphony, Mahler’s “new message” steered him closer to absolute music than in any previous work. One new emphasis in Mahler’s musical thinking was counterpoint, triggered by a study of Bach’s music. The Bach influence arises directly in brief fugal passages, and more generally in the careful layering of simultaneous motives. On a larger scale, the work reflects the epic tradition of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies, which, like Mahler’s Fifth, journey from minor-key openings to major-key conclusions.

The somber opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, labeled Funeral March, begins with a trumpet theme of three fast notes leading into an accented downbeat, a figure that echoes Beethoven’s “fate” motive from his Fifth Symphony as well as a related snippet from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. The fragment builds to a climactic ascent, joined by a thunderous chord.

Much of the movement dwells in permutations of that opening figure or in a contrasting lament from the strings. The greatest departure comes in an episode with a new tempo characterized as Plötzlich schneller. Leidenschaftlich. Wild. (“Suddenly faster. Passionate. Wild.”) The music is somehow sincere and grotesque at the same time, illuminating an inner facet of the slow dirge that eventually regains its hold.

Mahler grouped the Symphony’s five movements into three larger parts, with Part I containing the Funeral March along with its ferocious counterpart, marked Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz (“Moving stormily, with the greatest vehemence”). The fervent opening passage, saturated with braying brass and winds and impassioned string melodies, dissipates into a slow and nostalgic theme that echoes aspects of the Funeral March. Near the end, a brilliant brass chorale flirts with a noble resolution, but the chaotic and despairing music wins out—for now.

Part II of the Symphony consists of a single movement: an enormous Scherzo. The vigorous horn calls and three-beat sway evoke the rustic atmosphere of a Ländler dance in the Austrian countryside. Other passages turn more intimate and urbane, closer in spirit to a Viennese waltz. In a letter he sent to Alma after the Symphony’s first rehearsal, Mahler seized on the multifaceted Scherzo as presenting a particular conundrum for conductors and audiences alike. “The Scherzo is the very devil of a movement,” he wrote. “I see it is in for a peck of troubles!”

Part III of the Symphony begins with the iconic Adagietto, which drapes a simple, singing melody over poignant harmonies enunciated with angelic flecks of harp. A friend of the Mahlers, conductor Willem Mengelberg, indicated that the Adagietto was a musical love letter from Gustav to Alma; others have recognized an elegiac tint to its beauty, including Leonard Bernstein, who conducted it at a memorial service for Robert Kennedy.

The Rondo-Finale once again gives the horn a prominent role, joined at the beginning by other pastoral woodwind solos. Then, in a sign of Bach’s influence, a fugue works its way through the strings as the finale gathers momentum. A variant of the same bright chorale that offered false promise in the second movement returns at the end, and this time it delivers the Symphony to a triumphant conclusion, completing the strange and scenic journey from C-sharp minor to D major.

Even Mahler himself seemed overwhelmed by the perplexing depth and range of this Symphony. “Oh, heavens,” he wrote in that same letter to Alma, “what is the public to make of this chaos in which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble into ruin the next moment? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to these breathtaking, iridescent, and flashing breakers?”

-- © 2022 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.