A few months before starting his six -week Mahler project in 2012, a 30 -year -old Gustavo Dudamel said he was studying as crazy.
Just before the first concert on January 13 of the same year, he said: “It's crazy”, the madness being that he was about to try something beyond reason: performing the nine Mahler symphonies finished and the first movement of the 10th With the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra from Venezuela for three weeks in Los Angeles, then immediately repeating it in Caracas.
When he was asked how he felt at the end, an almost disdain dudamel could barely drive out “craaaazzzy”.
The Mahler project may have been crazy, but it was not without a certain priority and plume only. For more than three decades – from a time when the live performance of these symphonies, each a psychic experience, were not commonplace – the local company Mahler organized annual “mahlerthons”. From 8 a.m. to midnight, recordings of everything Mahler was played. You could also pick up a gray Mahler sweatshirt and a “Mahler Groove” bumper sticker.
With a sublime madness, Dudamel is in the middle of another Mahler project with the Phil's concert hall in Walt Disney which takes place on Sunday. “Mahler Grooves” may not be so crazy for Dudamel, which leads only two complete symphonies, the fifth and seventh. But neither this mature mahlerian now 44 years old nor the Phil have lost their audacity. On Sunday, when the Oscars lasted almost four hours, a 10 am Mahlerthon, the first of all of all time, took place at the Disney Hall.
Six local students orchestras – high school students as well as musicians from the university and the conservatory – interpreted movements of symphonies n ° 1, 3 and 4. The second and sixth were played. Barely children's stuff, these symphonies prove some of the greatest musical and emotional challenges even for the biggest professional orchestras. But Sunday, with amazing enthusiasm and illegal expertise, more than 500 young people from all over the whole of them devoted to research, from the example of Mahler, the sense of life.
The day started with the Phil Yola, 150 young strong musicians, playing the last movement of the first of Mahler under Alan Mautner. A snufu with digital tickets prevented me from reaching my seat in time, so I ended up hearing the performance in the listening room upstairs, where the sound is channeled directly from the scene but where you cannot see the orchestra. Regardless, the external was contagious.
The Los Angeles interurban orchestra, led by Charles Dickerson III, took the enormous assignment of the first and last movements of the third, its longest symphony. This large set of adolescents addressed the search for peace and the community of Mahler among chaos and the beauty of nature and our own emotional chaos, with inspiring tenacity.
The Santa Monica High School's room orchestra brought a charming and lyrical shine to the Mahler string orchestra of the “Death and the Maiden” string in Schubert. The School Symphony Orchestra then turned to the first movement of Mahler's fourth. So, suavely sophisticated was the performance led by Jason Aiello, I had to blink a few times to remind me that these were high school students.
In the evening, Neal Stulberg led an intense, brilliant and fascinating performance of the most agitated Symphony of Mahler, the sixth of 80 minutes (known as “tragic”). Later, the Colburn Orchestra ended the long day with a flamboyant performance of Mahler's second symphony, “the resurrection”, led with Flare by Earl Lee. Madison Leonard and Kayleigh Decker were the two moving vocal soloists, while the members of the Los Angeles Master choir provided a flamboyant end.
It turns out that, while half of the choir master rings the rafters of one of the largest concert halls in the world, resuscitating Mahler's message of hope for a new generation, the other half of the choir was stuck in one of the largest acoustic auditorium in the world in the Oscars segment for the Oscar theater for the “memory” in the Dolace Theyace.
There is more importance to what what does not answer the ear. The and Hollywood in particular, offer a unique heritage from Mahler. It may be well known that many German emigrants were closely associated with Mahler. They included conductor (Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter), composers (notably Arnold Schoenberg) and writers (Thomas Mann), as well as the widow of Mahler, the composer Alma Mahler, and their daughter, the sculptor Anna Mahler.
But it turns out that two other emigrant composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, who were both influenced by Mahler, created the score of modern symphonic film. And what better Hollywood connection than Anna Mahler (whose Klemperer's bust is one of the first things you see in the Dorothy Chandler pavilion) even appeared in the Groucho Marx radio show, “You bet your life.”
Mahler, indeed, grooves. I do not know if Dudamel stuck a bumper sticker on his car (they are on sale at the Disney Hall store), but his master's degree in Mahler developed considerably. He opened the festival with “blumin”, which Mahler originally wanted a movement of the first symphony but eliminated in a later revision, and the adagio of his tenth symphony, his last.
Together, this flowering of a beginning and an end -of -life meditation created an incredible feeling of wealth. Dudamel has forced nothing. Mahler seemed to be fair. Last week with the seventh, “Song of the Night”, Dudamel reheeded from sound landscapes, capturing with night music strangely evocative of the surprising immediacy, surrounded by tragedy and triumph, resonating massively in the ravors by fire in fire.
But nothing symbolizes resilience like the Mahlerthon. Five hundred young musicians cannot be mistaken.
