Mahler's Ninth and the eternal night

In preparation for the Mahler Festival 2020, the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Myung-Wun Chung gave a performance in which, after a, at times, timid beginning, all stops were pulled out. The Rondo Burleske was the starting signal for a second half, in which conductor and orchestra led us full of energy and dramatic eloquence to the end of Mahler's mighty Ninth, where the eternal night awaited us. Thus the last symphony that Gustav Mahler completed during his lifetime, became an excursion through a garden of sound in which all aspects of life were evoked. The fear of the dark, an approaching death and lust for life. It was all there.

Of the many indescribable pleasures of listening to music, the listening experience that brings together different experiences of life is one of the best. You hear a piece, and that moment of listening resonates long afterward—echoing in other music, in the things you encounter later that day or in the days that follow, in the places you go and the experiences you have there. Music that appeals to our capacity to impose structure and meaning on what we hear—music that builds a bridge between the focused listening in the concert hall and the diffuse impressions of the world outside, the sound of traffic on the way home, the rhythm of the city—can offer a rare and deeply rewarding pleasure: an experience that extends to the very edge of what music can be for us. What made that possible in this case was not even a performance that could be called perfect in every respect, but one that carried within it a certain energy and awakened a curiosity that completely absorbed you—and that, long after the final note had faded into an infinite, eternal moment, continued to gently stir the mind with fresh impressions.

ECSTASY AND FAREWELL
That one thought—that the composer of this mighty work was never granted the time of life to hear it performed in concert himself—came over me immediately after the final note. The tragedy of it was intensely palpable, like a coda revealing itself under the post-Christmas streetlights, manifesting as hope for the spirit that remains long after the body has yielded. Myung-Whun Chung approached the first two movements—with their syncopated rhythms of a disturbed dance—with a sense of understatement. After allowing us a glimpse into the intricacies of a finely woven structure, he led us into a confrontation with the rich contrasts and dramatic abysses that reside in Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The Rondo-Burleske, the third movement, became a true rollercoaster—an exercise in counterpoint that offered the listener a look into the mind of a composer who dares to face life while staring into the abyss. A place where seraphim toast with the devil; where life, in all its ecstatic joy and orgasmic yearning, reveals itself in full. Under Chung, the orchestra sounded as though it might fly off the rails—an electrifying sensation in this fugue that I had never experienced before, and one I never want to miss again. After the Rondo-Burleske left us gasping, the Adagio immediately took that breath away again. From its very first notes, it felt like a kind of musical high mass. Chung gave it full weight, and in the drama that unfolded, life and death came together with staggering intensity. We didn’t need to choose between the possible interpretations—whether the end of Mahler’s Ninth was a farewell to the world or a reaffirmation of life. In this performance, the dialectic between life and death found its proper, inevitable place.

ANTI-EGO
Remarkable in all this was Chung's anti-ego. At the beginning he suddenly popped up in the orchestra, for him no majestic descent from the red staircase, suddenly he stood there, seemingly lost. They just barely had to point him to his spot. Afterwards, he seemed too modest to want to receive the final applause. He even went down on his knees in front of the orchestra to do so. All this modesty--feigned or otherwise--made you wonder whether the freedom you heard in this performance was one given to the orchestra by the conductor or whether the orchestra had taken that freedom itself. Probably the Concertgebouw Orchestra can pull off an imposing piece like Mahler 9 even without a conductor, and perhaps that was what they did. The drive in the last two movements was riveting, the enthusiasm afterwards contagious. The bows went up in the air to the applause that maestro and orchestra received, a sign of the orchestra's respect for the conductor (something they notably did not do for Jaap van Zweden, who had stood on that same podium just a month earlier).

MAHLER & HEAVY METAL
And so this performance of Mahler’s Ninth—serving as a prelude to the Mahler Festival 2020—became a journey through a world where Fear of the Dark, Creeping Death, and Lust for Life converged. A performance in which the Rondo-Burleske, Mahler’s own YYZ, became a Crazy Train hurtling toward the abyss, filled with ecstatic joy and orgasmic exhilaration. A Rondo-Burleske that served as the springboard for the Adagio—that ungodly beautiful meditation on life and death, a vanishing act into the great nothing, a Fade to Black.

MAHLER 9, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Myung-Wun Chung / Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 5 February 2020

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- Wouter de Moor