Your review: SFS and MTT - marvelous and magic!

I must admit it. I had not listened to Mahler before last Friday evening. I am not a music expert, and often we listen what we already know rather than new authors. And now I can only think on learn and listen more about him.

I had read that Mahler's Ninth Symphony has some relationship with death: he was afraid of ending up like Beethoven and Dvořák, with just nine symphonies. So he worked hard and as quick as he could on finishing this one, and even started the Tenth. Unfortunately, he died before finishing it, and without having heard both in concert.

I must admit I could not find death during the evening, though I looked for it. Of course, when basses and cellos started let some notes of the underworld flow, one could feel deep inside some fear. The fear that Mahler felt. But that lasted just a few moments, as another theme began.

Actually, the symphony did not begin there. There was silence, and gradually we could heard harps and horns to arrive to the Philharmonie very slowly, while the violins advanced as sea waves. Soon the orchestra joined other voices, climbing a mountain and having a look at the world at its feet.

I must admit I had never listened to a symphony so long, so rich and so different. Different to itself, only the first movement lasted over half an hour. It was also the first time that I heard four flutes and a piccolo in an orchestra!

If I would have been asked when this work was composed, blind eyes, I would have said in the 70s at least. A film soundtrack was in it. And another one after that, and yet another, up to three films, a real contest of soundtracks. Mahler died in 1911, yet his music has an undeniable modernity. In addition I am sure that, he influenced the music in the United Stats while he was living there.

Like other symphonies at that time (I am thinking of the Russians), the 9th has two very different movements in the middle: a dance (of the dead?) and a march, making a contrast with the beginning and end of the symphony. But this would be a very unfair generalization, because there are enough themes that change all the time. For example, in the march, I felt a game, a very funny kind of dialogue between instruments, yet instruments families. One would fear to be in the middle of their discussion, because she could get lose.

I blame the San Francisco Symphony and Tilson Thomas, its director, to make me enjoy Mahler so much that I am so looking forward to listening to him now. I blame them to make us spend a marvelous, magic, magmatic evening. :-) Bravo!

Fulgencio Sanmartín