Last night the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra opened the first of a three-night engagement of their season finale: a complete and uninterrupted performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor. The epic concert served as a thrilling close to a season of upheavals and new arrivals within the ASO’s long standing internal structure.
It was a season that saw the historic arrival of Nathalie Stutzmann as music director — only the second woman in history to lead a major American symphony orchestra. It also was the official conclusion of Robert Spano’s 20-year tenure leading the orchestra, and the retirement of a number of notable familiar faces within the ASO ensemble itself.
In their last performance, the ASO seemed to be playing it safe during this uncertain time by leaning on more conservative, understated fare but their enthusiastic about-face into Mahler’s Third Symphony put that assumption to rest.
The evening commenced with the showing of a short but warmhearted documentary to commemorate Robert Spano’s tenure. The piece emphasized Spano’s commitment to new music by living composers — something the ASO explored in a set of special concerts last fall — and featured comments about Spano’s character and work ethic from various symphony players.
In light of such enthusiastic sentiments, it seemed only fitting that the outgoing conductor take on a piece as sprawling and intricate as Mahler’s Third Symphony for his season-ending performance.
Written in 1896 while Mahler enjoyed the alpine air of his extended vacation in Steinbach in Upper Austria, Symphony No. 3 is a massive tour-de-force. It encompasses funeral dirges, military marches, folk music and the omnipresent sounds of the natural world that bind them together.
The ASO’s program notes quote Mahler as saying, “A symphony must be like the world: It must contain everything.” Such wide-reaching sentiments are aptly applied to Symphony No. 3, where the composer aimed to encompass nothing less than existence itself.
The work opens with horns conveying the ominous solemnity of military fanfare and it was their sterling clarity in the context of the ASO’s brass section that heralded a stirring performance from the ensemble as a whole. The brass instruments of any ensemble walk a fine tightrope — avoiding errant, distorted blasts on one hand and the milquetoast meanderings of weak delivery on the other. The precision with which an orchestra’s horns enter the fray can serve as a reliable bellwether for the quality of the performance at hand. The ASO delivered beautifully, sounding out an imposing martial presence.
Mahler maintains that stunning grandeur in the form of two corollary elements: thunderous charges from the percussion and a sustained Wagnerian tremolo from the strings. In both, the ASO was on point — creating the tense and menacing aura that permeated the symphony’s first movement.
What is most remarkable about the composition is the manner in which it crescendos in intensity. It doesn’t merely increase the volume, but layers tiny and seemingly disparate musical vignettes on top of one another until the combined energy culminates in an overflowing of intensity. It is a supremely challenging compositional technique for an orchestra to replicate but the ASO carried it off wonderfully, with the balance in the horn section seeming to serve as a guiding light to the rest of the ensemble.
The opening movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony is an iconic and labyrinthine expanse, but each movement bears substantial treasures. Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor delivered the evening’s standout performance in the symphony’s fourth movement. The stirring vocal solo takes its lyric from Thus Sprach Zarathustra, the enduring fictional work by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche whose stirring words are as fierce and vicious in their tone as they are inspiring and life-affirming.
For Nietzsche, joy and personal fulfillment are not mere lighthearted merriments but rather deep and soul shattering revelations that forever alter the person who experiences them. O’Connor seemed all too aware of the deep implications of Nietzsche’s words and delivered them almost in the guise of an actor playing a character. Her face seemed to curve around each word as though imbuing them with a level of narrative awareness not normally seen in even the most outstanding of vocal soloists.
Nietzsche observed that chaos produces order and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is proof of that: A chaotic year has given way to promises of a new paradigm, one that the players seem thrilled to embrace as if channeling the forward-looking passions of Zarathustra himself. From that standpoint, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor is the perfect anthem for both the closing of the 2021-22 season and Robert Spano’s tenure as the orchestra’s leader.
The program will be repeated on Saturday and Sunday.
