The Classical Review

With multiple street closures and exits off the Drive shut down for a race in the Loop, audience members trying to get to Orchestra Hall Thursday night had nearly as arduous a journey as the one that takes place musically in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.

That epic work was the sole item on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Jaap van Zweden Thursday evening. The Dutch conductor and orchestra will take Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies on a two-week European tour, starting next week with the Mahler Festival in Amsterdam.

The Sixth is the darkest of all works in Mahler’s oeuvre, an 80-minute journey dominated by menacing marches and jarring brass outbursts. For all his bleak moments, it is the only Mahler symphony to end pessimistically, in complete breakdown and despair. Alma Mahler said the three fateful hammer blows of the final movement represented a trio of personal tragedies for the composer: his firing from the Vienna Opera; the death of his young daughter, Maria; and the diagnosis of the heart condition that would lead to Mahler’s death five years after the Sixth’s premiere at age 50.

Van Zweden led the last CSO performances of the Sixth three years ago (as well as at Ravinia in 2012). The driven, haunted Sixth is much better suited to his nervy, tightly coiled style than Mahler’s Seventh—which he conducted with the CSO three weeks ago— and Thursday night’s CSO performance proved riveting and wholly compelling.

From the opening notes, the double-basses clearly meant business in their punchy riffs of the malign quick-march that dominates the first movement. The conductor took a characteristically bracing clip for the long opening movement with consistently strong forward impetus. If the pace felt a bit relentless, the  music is fairly relentless as well. 

Yet van Zweden pointed up contrasts much more effectively than in the recent, rather monochrome, Seventh. Alma’s theme was rendered with great warmth and the bucolic episodes made tender contrast. The conductor balanced Mahler’s huge forces with great skill and clarity (though the initial iteration of the offstage cowbells was nearly inaudible).

In his superb Mahler Sixth with the Bavarian Radio Symphony last year, Simon Rattle made a convincing case for placing the Andante moderato second rather than third. (Mahler was ambivalent about the ordering of the inner movements and conductors are free to choose their own sequence.) Doing so avoids the immediate repetition of similar material in the Scherzo and it also sets up the finale more effectively. 

Van Zweden kept to the traditional order and the Scherzo, placed second, proved potent and mercurial, with oboist William Welter adding a delicious Landler lilt to the first trio and the conductor drawing out queasy undertones in the lower brass.

The songful Andante was the heart of Thursday’s performance. Van Zweden unfolded this respite from the surrounding tension and bleakness—one of Mahler’s most indelible inspirations—with sensitive feeling and breadth, aided by quite beautiful playing from the entire ensemble, especially the expressive solo contributions from principal horn Mark Almond and English hornist Scott Hostetler.

The half-hour finale is nearly a symphony in itself. Here too, van Zweden’s direction was impressive, as isolated notes slowly arise out of the darkness, coalescing and finding form like the wind strands in “The Adoration of the Earth” in Rite of Spring. The surging power and virtuosity of the playing was staggering even by CSO standards as the music gathers force and confidence, only to be repeatedly felled by the inevitable fate of the thudding hammer blows. (Following Mahler’s dicta, the conductor dispensed with the third and final blow.) The bleakness of the coda was stark and unsparing, with the sepulchral maunderings of the lower brass conveying an existential desolation.

The CSO’s playing was extraordinary across all sections in this intense musical tragedy. Apart from some apparent fatigue in the finale, Almond and his horn section colleagues played with both strength and firm projection. The duo-timpanists and hard-working percussion battery were especially deserving of honors, with Cynthia Yeh’s hammer blows dead-on in their fatal impact. 

Prepared and directed with great facility by van Zweden, the CSO’s Mahler Sixth will likely enjoy great success in Amsterdam next week as well as subsequent stops on the orchestra’s European tour.