Saturday night, the San Francisco Symphony presented Mahler’s Symphony No.5 at Hill Auditorium. Because of the no late seating policy, my friend and I arrived at the auditorium at 7:30. Surprisingly, there were already many people there. By 8 pm, the auditorium had been seated to its full capacity. When the concert actually began, I couldn’t see any empty seats around me, at least in the balcony area.
Symphony No.9 was the last completed symphony by Gustav Mahler. The composer died in 1911, leaving his tenth symphony unfinished. Thus, many people interpret Symphony No. 9 as Mahler’s farewell to the world.
The first movement took a relatively slow tempo. It began with a quiet but plangent motif, as if telling a melancholy story. The repeating theme gradually reached a crescendo, and pushed the emotion to a climax. Then the lyrical motif came back, and followed another crescendo. Despite the loudness of the music, I felt a tension of constraint within the melody. It sounded like a person in outrage however trying to suppress and control his emotion at the same time. And every time after he calmed down, the lyrical melody took over as if he is pouring out his concerns to a close friend.
The second movement was rather merry and lively. With various thrills played by the strings, the second part sounded like a humorous Scherzo. Strings, trumpets, bassoons and flutes took turns, forming an interactive conversation among different instruments. The triangle also added to the playfulness of the music.
Continuing the merriness of the second movement, the third movement was even more vigorous and expressive. Violins and flutes became the chief instruments in the middle and took extremely high pitches and fast tempo. The rhythm got faster and more furious, and the rousing sounds of trumpets further strengthened the intensity of the music. This movement ended in an eloquent climax after several progressive modulations.
On the contrary, in the fourth movement the slow and lyrical rhythm came back, but the tone was even more solemn and nostalgic than the first movement. After an extremely loud and fervent section, the plucking sound of the harps pacified the rhythm and the melody became quiet. All the other instruments stopped playing except for the strings, which repeated a phrase over and over in a really quiet, almost barely detectable, volume. There were several times when they got so quiet that I thought the movement had ended, but every time the same melody soon reentered and the orchestra just went on playing. I felt like this repetition could be interpreted as the strong will of Mahler to live longer despite his weakness in health in his last days.
Overall, I had a mind-blowing concert experience with the San Francisco Symphony and the conductor of this performance, Michael Tilson Thomas. If you didn’t go to this concert, I highly recommend you to reserve a ticket early next time they come to Ann Arbor!
