By Kelly Dean Hansen, freelance classical music writer
For the journal of the Gustav Mahler Society of New York
Macky Auditorium on the University of Colorado campus was encouragingly full Sunday afternoon, May 22. The decision by Colorado MahlerFest to eliminate the repeated main concert after 2018 is partly responsible for that, but it is at least equally attributable to the quality of the MahlerFest orchestra under music director Kenneth Woods, now at the helm since 2016. Founded by Robert Olson in 1988, the annual festival in Boulder is centered around one of Gustav Mahler’s monumental symphonic works.
The featured symphony for the 2022 festival running May 17-22 was the gargantuan 1896 Third–the longest symphony in the standard repertoire–which famously builds a super-evolutionary world moving from inanimate matter in nature all the way through the love of God. A week of events around just that work would have provided a fulfilling experience, but Woods went far beyond that, including a concert version of Béla Bartók’s masterful one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle on another concert the night before.
At 100 minutes, the Third is typically performed by itself, but Woods placed it after an intermission and a concert opener, the world premiere of the one-movement 2017 Symphony No. 10 by English composer Christopher Gunning. As if that weren’t enough, the festival also included two substantial chamber music concerts and of course the traditional Saturday symposium. It can be confidently asserted that this was the most ambitious MahlerFest since the festival’s origin, and that is saying a great deal.
COVID-19 eliminated planned live events for the 33rd edition of MahlerFest in 2020 and postponed the 34th until August 2021. MahlerFest XXXV represented a return to the usual May calendar for the first time since 2019.
Woods has assembled a genuinely top-notch orchestra, which this year included new concertmaster Zachary DePue, known for his leadership role in the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the genre-crossing trio Time for Three. He is already familiar in Boulder through his many performances with the latter.
The performance of the Third under Woods was inspirational and revelatory, both in his musical and aesthetic choices. The tempi in the 35-minute first movement were often daring, but exhilarating. Principal trombone Lucas Borges was majestic in the long solo passages of the extended slow introduction. In the third movement depicting animals in the forest, trumpet player Richard Adams was mesmerizing in the offstage “posthorn” solos.
Mezzo-soprano Stacey Rishoi–who deeply moved the MahlerFest audience in 2018 with her performance in the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde–took up a smaller role here in the fourth and fifth movements, where Mahler turned to the human voice to express the entry of humanity, then the angels on the scene. Rishoi intoned the words of Friedrich Nietzsche with great sensitivity in the still, remarkably modern fourth movement.
In the fifth movement, Mahler asks for a women’s choir and a children’s choir for all of five minutes, but the symphony would be an entirely different entity without them. The Boulder Chorale, under the excellent leadership of Vicki Burrichter, and the affiliated Boulder Children’s Chorale made a remarkable impact. This was partly due to Woods’s brilliant decision to place the singers in the front rows of the house rather than at the back of the orchestra. He even directed the children to use their hands to amplify their voices once they get actual text to sing instead of the repeated “bimm bamm.”
Woods had the singers remain standing through the hushed opening of the stately slow final movement, allowing Mahler’s direction to proceed without a pause to occur with minimal disturbance. They did sit when the movement became louder.
Preceding the Third with another piece was bold, but fortunately Gunning’s 10th Symphony (which Woods recorded in 2019) is a tuneful and highly enjoyable piece of music, which proceeds logically and imaginatively through its twenty minutes after the distinctive viola opening. Gunning is known for his film scores, but he later moved to symphonic composition, producing thirteen works that have mostly been recorded but, until now, never performed before a live audience according to Woods.
The performance of Bluebeard’s Castle on Saturday was at a new venue for the festival, Mountain View United Methodist Church. Always a fine concert locale, the church has undergone recent acoustic improvements. Woods made several convincing arguments as to what Bartók and Mahler have to do with each other, including among other things their connection to vernacular music and to Beethoven.
The story of the mysterious Bluebeard, his bride Judith, and the opening of the seven doors that constitutes the entirety of the drama is so effectively illustrated in Bartók’s riveting 1911 score that staging is not even necessary. Woods enlisted two magnificent singers in the opera’s only roles. Bass Gustav Andreassen intoned Bluebeard’s entreaties and regrets with stentorian, resonant tone. Soprano April Frederick, whose presence is as striking as her voice, made the audience empathize profoundly with Judith and her emotional trajectory. Part of the work’s basic character is its setting in the expressive, rich Hungarian language, of which both singers demonstrated mastery. English titles were projected, with color coding for the seven doors.
The tastefully reduced chamber orchestration by Christopher van Tuinen and Michael Karcher-Young did not diminish the impression of the music, and that this heart-rending performance was not the main event is itself a wonder.
The two chamber concerts were also meaty affairs. The opening program on Tuesday at the University’s Grusin Music Hall featured CU faculty pianists David Korevaar and Jeremy Reger presenting piano duet arrangements of several movements from Mahler’s symphonies, as well as Mahler’s own arrangement of two movements from Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony. It is always interesting to hear orchestral music in this way, as most people did before the age of recordings.
Korevaar’s performance of Ignaz Friedman’s virtuoso solo piano arrangement of the second movement from the Third Symphony was possibly the highlight. Soprano Frederick sang along with Mahler’s own well known piano roll recording of the song finale from the Fourth Symphony, which was somewhat hampered by a technical glitch, through which Frederick continued seamlessly. Reger played a solo version of the Fifth Symphony’s opening funeral march, another movement Mahler himself recorded on a piano roll. Korevaar and Reger were almost heroic in this unusual presentation of several lengthy symphonic movements, but the result was an unusually long concert.
Thursday’s afternoon event was also at MVUMC. There, the principal string players from the orchestra presented a selection of works that mostly connected to the other concerts. The standout performer on the program was cellist Parry Karp. He opened the event with the difficult 1955 solo cello sonata by revered American composer George Crumb (who died earlier this year) and closed it with the incredibly virtuosic 1906 Cello Sonata No. 1 by Italian composer Alfredo Casella (whose arrangement of the Mahler Seventh’s finale closed the piano program).
Karp was joined by CU faculty pianist Jennifer Hayghe for the demanding Casella work, which both performers brought off with great aplomb. Hayghe also participated in a performance of Christopher Gunning’s pleasant 2013 piano trio with Karp and violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, previewing the composer’s style before the performance of his symphony.
DePue, Associate Concertmaster Suzanne Casey, principal violist Mario Rivera, and Woods himself on cello played the slow movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, Op. 135, which has been seen as the source for the main melody of the Mahler Third’s finale. They also played the Bartók’s First String Quartet from 1909 (whose opening was also inspired by a late Beethoven quartet). The Bartók quartets are notoriously difficult, and these first-rate string players were up to the challenge.
The daylong Saturday symposium, an integral feature of MahlerFest since its inception, was held at MVUMC in advance of the Bluebeard performance. The presenters were engaging and informative, particularly emeritus Oxford music professor Peter Franklin, whose book on the Third Symphony is perhaps the most important and impactful exploration of the work. Musicologist Leah Batstone, a protégée of Franklin, spoke of the influence of Nietzsche on Mahler’s early symphonies.
Frederick provided an insightful and stimulating introduction to the psychological drama of Bluebeard’s Castle. Woods gave his usual enjoyable discussion of conductor’s interpretation, inviting audience members to select pages from the Third’s score at random. Finally, Nick Pfefferkorn of publisher Breitkopf and Härtel spoke of the editorial process for the firm’s new edition of the symphony, which was used for the performance.
Dr Kelly Dean Hansen holds a PhD in Musicology from University of Colorado at Boulder where his dissertation was focused on the music of Mahler. He has produced a popular series of listening guides on the complete music of Johannes Brahms and served as music critic of the Boulder Daily Camera from 2011-2018.
