June 7, 2014 The San Antonio Symphony’s account of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on Friday night, closing its last classical subscription season in the Majestic Theatre, evoked impressions as contradictory as the moods of the symphony itself. Conducted by music director Sebastian Lang-lessing, who has shown himself to be a formidable Mahlerian in several previous outings, the performance was superb in some ways, frustratingin others. That was the initial impression, at least. On further reflection, I’m not sure about the frustrations. A little background about the composition of the Fifth Symphony: Mahler began writing it in the summer of 1901 and completed it the following summer. It was an unusually eventful period in his life.  Early in 1901 he had nearly died from a brain hemorrhage, and that same year he had read and been affected by Friedrich Rückert’s “Songs on the Death of Children,” a collection of poems responding to a 19th-century scarlet fever epidemic. The same summer he began working on the Fifth Symphony, he composed two of his five settings of the Rückert poems. Death was on his mind, as is evident from the Viennese funeral march of the first movement. But in November of 1901 he met and quickly fell in love with the young, vivacious and beautiful Alma Schindler, a budding composer who at the time was on the rebound from a relationship with her teacher, the highly regarded composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. Mahler proposed marriage a month later, soon after the generally derided premiere of his Fourth Symphony. The following spring the 41-year-old Mahler married the 22-year-old Alma. When he resumed working on his Fifth Symphony, Mahler presented his bride with the manuscript for the work’s heavenly fourth movement, the Adagietto, as a sort of love letter.  Curiously, the theme of that love letter is closely related to the opening of “Nun seh  ich wohl,” the second of Mahler’s “Songs on the Death of Children.” So love and death are not easily separated. (Alma, by the way, resumed seeing Zemlinsky for musical purposes, with Mahler’s knowledge, after the wedding. She greatly admired Zemlinsky’s music and her own and was not much impressed by her husband’s. After Mahler died in 1911, Alma married the Modernist architect Walter Gropius – they had already been lovers since 1910 – and then the writer Franz Werfel. She also composed some wonderful songs influenced by Zemlinsky, to judge from the few that survived.) The Fifth Symphony can be appreciated for the formal symmetries in its five-movement structure,  for its contrapuntal intricacies (especially in the tumultuous second movement) and of course for its masterful orchestration, but above all it packs a huge emotional punch, or series of punches, pulling the listener along a journey from world-weary sorrow to turmoil to ingratiating sweetness to love-tinged-with-death to giddy triumph. And one has the sense in the Fifth, more than in any other of Mahler’s symphonies, that all the emotional swings are drawn from his own life. My initial frustration with the performance concerned what seemed at times to be an excessive fussiness in Mr. Lang-Lessing’s massaging of tempos, interrupting the momentum of the long line — usually one of his great strengths. Most often the shaping was supple and organic, but sometimes I wished he would just let the music flow. Yet, given the contradictory tugs in the music and in Mahler’s life, maybe Mr Lang-Lessing’s highly interventionist approach had its own trenchancy. It would be interesting to hear how he might address this music differently a decade or two from now. Certainly the glories of this performance were many. The second movement’s complexities were rendered with clockwork precision; many often-obscured details emerged cleanly.  The Viennese lilt was palpable in the scherzo, which featured a magisterial solo performance by principal horn Jeff Garza. In the opening funeral march the conductor found the ideal balance between trudging sadness and the lightness of acceptance. There and in the Adagietto the strings sounded better than ever — radiant and silken, if not positively buttery. Some stretches of the Adagietto were taken with extreme slowness, but the results were so lovingly shaped and so incredibly beautiful that it would be beastly to complain. There were some fine solo performances in addition to Mr. Garza’s, especially from principal flute Martha Long, oboist Hideaki Okada and (despite a few forgivable lip lapses) principal trumpet John Carroll.               The concert opened with the Children’s Chorus of                     San Antonio joining the orchestra in six of Aaron                     Copland’s Old American Songs — not an odd pairing                     with Mahler when you consider how important                     folk-song material was in Mahler’s symphonies. The higher                          voices sounded a little thin in the Majestic’s difficult acoustics,                     but the  singing was generally crisp and energetic, a tribute to                    excellent training by founder and director Marguerite                                   McCormick and associate director Irma Taute. The                      performance was Ms. McCormick’s swan song: An onstage                     ceremony marked her retirement.                      Before the music began, symphony president David Gross                     noted the imminent move of principal trombone Amanda                     Stewart to the St. Louis Symphony — she and her section  mates would play flawlessly in the Mahler. He also observed the retirement of principal oboe Mark Ackerman and named him the orchestra’s first musician emeritus. Mr. Ackerman’s 38 years of service earned him a warm standing ovation from the audience and the orchestra. The symphony has just one more concert in the Majestic — the 75th Anniversary Concert with violinist Joshua Bell on June 14 — and then moves into the new Tobin  Center with a special concert featuring soprano Renée Fleming on Sept. 20. Mike Greenberg  

Gustav Mahler in 1901, with the trumpet fanfare that opens the Fifth Symphony

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Alma Mahler

San Antonio Symphony, SLL

Aaron Copland

Mahler’s Fifth: Love and death, tumult and triumph

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