Almost lost in the power of the Mahler was a stylish, lovely performance of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto by English trumpet-virtuoso extraordinaire Alison Balsom.Josh Clavir
It's always bracing, I think, to expose yourself to a gust of Mahler on a regular basis. And that's because the Austrian composer, though dead for more than 100 years, may be the most modern composer of all, perfectly suited to our confusing, anxious, scattered 21st century. Through the window of Mahler's music comes whirling in every sort of musical scrap. Here's a gorgeous, lush, 19th-century Romantic melody, there a snatch of a brass band, here a macabre takeoff on Frère Jacques, there an immense fanfare apropos of nothing. Listening to a Mahler symphony is like surfing the Web or checking out YouTube. In the space of just a few minutes, you move from one idea to another, quickly, spontaneously, without seeming rhyme or reason.
Of course, that seeming spontaneity is a ruse. Mahler's sprawling symphonies, of which his First was presented Wednesday night by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor Edward Gardner, are carefully calculated in their immense, hour-long unravellings. Nonetheless, you can't successfully conduct Mahler, I think, from a disinterested, intellectual perch. You have to succumb to his hyper-emotionalism, his almost hysterical highs and lows – give yourself up, for better or worse, to the high-strung imagination and sensibility of this tortured composer.
And although Gardner conducted a powerful performance of Mahler No. 1, succumb to the music he did not. His was a dramatic but aloof reading, I thought – full of fine contrasts and exciting individual moments (like the unbelievably hushed opening), but lacking that close-your-eyes, take-a-deep-breath-and-leap-in approach that characterizes the most successful Mahler interpretations. Gardner certainly pulled wonderful performances from the individual members of the TSO, too numerous to mention by name, virtuosos all of them, in a work that needs bravura performances to be successful. But it's only by burrowing into the emotional through-line of the work that its seeming surface confusion can be made whole, so that it does not veer into a kitsch-like collage of the most disparate musical elements. We never strayed that far on Wednesday night, but you don't like to be reminded that that particular aesthetic ditch always seems to beckon when you take the Mahler roadster out for a spin.
Almost lost in the power of the Mahler was a stylish, lovely performance of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto by English trumpet-virtuoso extraordinaire Alison Balsom. It's not easy being a trumpet star in the classical world, because there are basically two concertos written for your instrument. Hummel wrote one; Haydn the other. And good old Johann Nepomuk Hummel was one of several composers in early 19th-century Vienna who wasn't Mozart (Mozart was his teacher), and whose work, sadly, suffers in comparison. His concerto is a decent enough piece (however, with a slow movement so similar to the slow movement of what we used to call the "Elvira Madigan" piano concerto that the Mozart estate should consider a suit), but it's never going to make a Classical Top 10 list. Alison Balsom's playing, however, more than made up up for the work's limitations. Although it's basically a martial instrument, Balsom managed to coax out of her horn a lovely variety of tone colours and emotional moments that was captivating and very musical. Some contemporary composer should write her a piece that would really show off her powerful talent. Until then, we'll have to take the Hummel. And the Haydn. And the Hummel. And the.…
And if you're keeping score, it was a very decent crowd that thoroughly enjoyed Wednesday's concert, despite it being a relatively frosty Toronto night. The stories about classical music's demise seem to have been part of conventional wisdom in the West since about the 1740s. But nothing else does what classical music does. Which is why it may not be going anywhere.