Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler’s 9th, by Steven Kruger

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Egon Schiele, Tod und Mann II, 1911, oil on canvas, Leopold Museum, Vienna

The San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor

Davies Hall, San Francisco
Thursday, May 5, 2011

Mahler - Symphony No. 9 in D major (1910)

Mahler's Ninth Symphony stood alone last Thursday at Davies Hall, as the San Francisco Symphony prepared for its European tour. It has become normal practice to schedule this work with a long, rather liquid "intermission" preceding it, instead of any music. And audiences intuitively understand why. They have signed on for an emotional catharsis.

The Mahler Ninth is a "Death" Symphony in deadly earnest, similar to the Shostakovich 15th. There is nothing cute about the miseries it contains, like the hanging of "Till Eulenspiegel,” or merely theatrical, such as the rifle-shots in Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory.” Mahler had recently been diagnosed with the heart infection which would ultimately kill him, and this work is his "Death and Transfiguration" in purely orchestral terms. One of two, really, if one leaves out Das Lied von der Erde. It seems that having completed it, the dying man felt so energized he decided to give death another whirl with the Tenth Symphony! And there is no reason to suppose it would have been any less successful than the Ninth, if Mahler had only lived to work out the kinks of orchestration. As it stands, the Tenth Symphony remains a blanker tombstone than Mahler might have desired, since musicologists disagree wildly about how deeply to chisel and what to inscribe, but both works travel the road of misery from yearning to acceptance and at the end find themselves six feet under.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!