Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 is huge. With extraordinarily imaginative ideas, a vast palette of instrumental colors—provided by four each of all the woodwinds and brass (though only one tuba) as well as strings, harp and percussion—it takes over five movements and 67 minutes to express what he wanted to say. He didn’t complete it before his death and many eminent musicians tried to do it in his place, but final success was achieved only after more than a half century. British music scholar Deryck Cooke took 15 years to complete it to his–and our–satisfaction.
Conductor Thomas Dausgaard (Photo courtesy Seattle Symphony)
It has taken even longer for Mahler’s Tenth to reach the Seattle Symphony, which performed Cooke’s version for the first time Thursday night at Benaroya Hall, under the direction of the SSO’s gifted principal guest conductor, Thomas Dausgaard. (The performance is repeated Saturday and Sunday.)
Some of the musicians, however, had played it before, notably those members of the orchestra who had been members of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. Hearing the symphony, it’s truly staggering to think that children could essay this monumental work, with its frequent changes of rhythm, of beat, of emotional content, but they did, and it says a lot for the leadership of the group’s then-conductor, Vilem Sokol.
Thursday’s performance was dedicated to the memory of those killed in Paris and Beirut last week and, full of anguish as it is, it felt appropriate. Mahler wrote into this symphony all the turmoil of his discovery of his wife’s affair with architect Walter Gropius, and at the same time the pain of recognizing his own mortality. He died of a heart condition early in 1911, only nine months after beginning the work.
Entirely original from this genius of a composer, the symphony starts with a beautiful long, slow elegiac melody with just the violas playing. That symphony section sounded like one instrument. From them on, though with return to the gentle violas, the symphony is one of huge contrasts, from screaming fortes to the softest whisper of pianissimos, from peaceful gentleness to desperation to lively lightheartedness to bewilderment and sorrow to carefree energy, in abrupt, even startling switches from one to another; as well as from spare instrumentation or solo instruments to the full complement of forces.
Under Dausgaard’s insightful and expert leadership, the orchestra soared through it, from the exquisite breath of sound of their softest playing to turbulent clashes in the brass to the shocking doom-prescient seven whacks on the bass drum, later five more. Only the first movement sounded a bit ragged at times as though the musicians were not yet completely in the groove, particularly the first violins, who spent much time in their highest register, deliberately screaming and shrill, but with slight variation in intonation between individuals. They didn’t sound like one instrument as they should have.
No intermission broke up the performance, and nothing else was on the program. It would have been hard to find anything else to follow it. Dausgaard recognized many individual players and then many sections during the enthusiastic applause, but on his second return to the podium, the orchestra refused to stand and applauded him themselves along with the audience.
