April 17, 18, and 19, 2025
Orchestra Hall
Chicago, Illinois – USA
Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Jaap van Zweden, conductor.
Gustav MAHLER: Symphony No. 7 (1905)
Christopher Hill | 21 APR 2025
Mahler’s music is a well-nigh perfect fit for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—and it has been since (at the very least) the days of Rafael Kubelik. Mahler’s complex instrumentation exposes each instrument with dispassionate clarity, a clarity the composer continued to refine in his symphonies, performance after performance, sometimes over decades. Chicago players have long been capable of revelling in this clarity, playing not only with virtuoso command of the individual parts but with uncannily perfect balances. In addition, Chicago players are known to like challenging pieces, especially ones they don’t get to play as often, and here, the Seventh Symphony suits them to a tee.
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is sometimes nicknamed “Song of the Night.” Like many Mahler symphonies, it has five movements; here, two are labeled ‘Nachtmusik’ (‘Night Music’ or ‘Nocturne’). In this respect, the nickname works. It is also appropriate in implying that the composition as a whole is “about” something (besides musical logic), that at least broadly it’s programmatic. Of course, music lovers and composers have been pasting programmatic titles, some more specious than others, onto instrumental pieces since the French Baroque and perhaps since the English virginalists. So, who cares? Mahler did. In fact, the musical world of Mahler’s lifetime was riven by the question of narrative in music, with Liszt, his followers, and his advocates on the pro side and Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s followers and their advocates at least halfway on the other, con side.
In his younger years, Mahler was happy to provide narrative accounts of his music; being a musician, he considered these narratives suggestive rather than definitive. But when journalists, anchored as they often are in written words, repeatedly failed to understand what Mahler was getting at, the composer, dismayed by misguided criticism, stopped sharing his narratives. He could, he said, easily supply detailed ones for his later symphonies, but they would likely be misunderstood.
So, what can audiences do with such information? One possibility is to see Mahler as an opera conductor-slash-composer who, in Symphonies 5, 6, and 7, challenged himself to write instrumental music with the unprecedented amalgam of motivic, contrapuntal, and dramatic richness found in Wagner’s Ring. In The Ring, musical “leading motives” are given narrative meaning through operatic stagecraft that associates them in real time with specific characters, objects, and intentions. In a symphony, Mahler could not avail himself of this luxury, but he could still treat musical sentences and paragraphs as characters in a story. Your reviewer thinks Mahler’s boldest attempt to do this is heard in the last movement of the Seventh Symphony, which aspires to the sort of positive peroration found in Bruckner’s and Beethoven’s finales.
Unlike those composers, Mahler treats peroration as a character (or singular facet of experience), as when he cuts away from it, movielike, to give other characters (or facets of experience) more time in the narrative spotlight. It is because of such compositional techniques that this movement, comprising everything from royal fanfares to girlish sweetness to hustle and bustle to muttering in the scullery, can also be apprehended as a presentation of the interactions and interdependence of at least three or four social classes. My list is intended to be suggestive, of course.
What kind of performance did Jaap van Zweden and the Chicagoans give the Seventh Symphony? To this reviewer’s ears, one immensely consistent and coherent. For example, the sonata-form recapitulation in the first movement made perfect narrative sense in this reading; in seven or eight other performances I’ve heard or attended there has always been an unresolved tension between formal coherence and narrative coherence in the recap. It’s no small feat to bring something like this off in a completely natural way, as van Zweden and the Chicagoans did Saturday. Similar examples could be adduced in the inner movements. The ‘Scherzo’ was remarkably lean and lithe, the second ‘Nachtmusik’ ravishing, particularly in its dying final pages.
Could woodwind solos have sounded more authentically Central European? Definitely, yet the Chicago players are surely familiar with Klezmer-style performance practices and could no doubt play that way. They probably would have, had, say, Kubelik been conducting. But there’s more than one kind of authenticity in Mahler. At the northwestern edge of Europe, some cultural distance away from Central Europe lies Amsterdam, which was during Mahler’s lifetime also no stranger to the composer’s music, thanks to his friendship with fellow conductor/composer Willem Mengelberg, then music director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
When Mengelberg was rehearsing Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with the Concertgebouw in the composer’s presence, the conductor made copious annotations to his score, preserving details of the two men’s interchanges. One of the best known of these annotations describes how string sections should play Mahler symphonies: a punta d’arco, which results in a more nuanced, less competitive string tone, which in turn permits melody instruments (as often as not, brass, but also woodwind) to be heard over the strings while also playing with subtle nuance. That’s exactly how van Zweden and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed throughout Symphony Seven on Saturday. For the record, that performance had the following timings: I: 21:07; II: 1506; III: 9:33; IV: 12:01; V: 17:21.
Note that a punta d’arco is more or less the opposite interpretive approach to that taken in Bernstein’s N.Y. Philharmonic recording, regarded by some as the best ever of the Seventh Symphony. Well, ultimately, in a recreative medium like classical music, nothing more authentically compels listeners than that which resonates within the recreative players themselves. There was no question that van Zweden and the orchestra provided a compelling performance on Saturday. It was, as previously opined, the most coherent reading this reviewer has heard to date. It was also the most subtly nuanced performance I have heard, with astonishing internal balances in all textures and at all volume levels. When it comes to Mahler, few audiences are more knowledgeable than the season subscribers in Chicago. At the close, they rose together virtually as one and gave the performers a reception that still reverberates, one of the most vibrant and appreciative this reviewer has witnessed. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Chicago Symphony Orchestra: cso.org
- Jaap van Zweden: https://www.jaapvanzweden.com/
Read more by Christopher Hill.
