Jaap’s Final NY Phil Concert Is a Mahler Resurrection to Remember
/By Truman C. Wang
6/12/2024
Photo credit: NY Phil
Music Director Jaap Van Sweden is stepping down at the end of the current season after five years with the New York Philharmonic, to be succeeded by the L.A. Phil’s wunderkind conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The Mahler Second was his final subscription concert and the hottest ticket at the Lincoln Center. After that, the NY Phil will play park concerts around New York City, go on a 3-city China tour, and finally a summer stint in Vail, Colorado.
I attended the June 6 concert and was impressed by the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall’s three-tier horseshoe layout and open stage. At the start of the concert, the dimming crystal light bulbs did a happy dance as they were being raised and disappeared into the ceiling – a new take on the Met’s legendary rising chandeliers. The lights were kept on at half brightness for the benefit of those score readers in the audience (There were quite a few from where I could see.)
Immediately when the music started, I was impressed by the superlative playing of the New York Philharmonic. When the march theme of the first movement entered development (at around 13-minute mark), and was passed from the brass to the winds and then scattered throughout the orchestra, I felt I had never heard wind playing so rhythmically precise, so perfectly balanced, and purely tuned. I was also impressed with the sheer clarity of instrumental sounds that was missing in the old Avery Fisher Hall: the pizzicato strings in beginning of fifth movement, trumpet resurrection theme, and birdcalls all sounded clear and vivid. The New York Philharmonic Chorus was lively and accurate in their attack and delivery. Overall, the orchestral and choral timber tended toward top-heavy brilliance at the expense of warmth, although to be fair, the NY Phil was playing in a new hall with unfinished acoustics. To my ears, the Geffen Hall’s acoustics favors the high voices, so soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller was heard loud and clear with the chorus, while mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova was nearly inaudible in “O Schmerz”. They were also not helped by being seated inside the violin section. Another possible culprit of the lack of warmth was the orchestra’s seating layout; it was not ideal – the cellos were in the middle, the double-basses relegated to the far left, diffusing much impactful bass reaching the auditorium. (The big cello melody in second movement, for example, sounded almost flat without bass or warmth.)
On the interpretive front, with unfaltering mastery, maestro Van Sweden traced the massive architecture of the symphony. The music flowed through him. He is very nearly a complete Mahler conductor: emotional, excitable, and instinctive; disciplined, precise, and attentive to both passing details and the large form. Where some interpreters go too far and others not nearly far enough, his judgment of accent, emphasis, rubato, tempo change, string portamento seemed exactly right, and to be felt rather than calculated.
Of that last item, the string portamento, I was pleasantly surprised to hear it in the first-movement coda and other places throughout the symphony. The long slow slide between two notes gradually went out of fashion in the 1930’s (Mengelberg was the last conductor to employ it fully, but Bruno Walter, a Mahler disciple, used it only sparingly with the New York Philharmonic in 1947), but Van Sweden was not afraid to use it for expressive effects that are an essential part of Mahler’s music.
Another merit of Van Sweden’s Mahler Second interpretation was echoes of dark, deeper later works amidst the bright, lyrical Wunderhorn passages. In the violent tremolo in the double-basses at the start, and the angry outburst that opens the finale, one could almost hear the fateful Fifth Symphony, a middle-period work as desolate in tone and conception as the Second is consolatory.
The Second Symphony, Mahler said, asks, and tries to answer, “the great question: ‘Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all nothing but a huge, cruel jest?” It leads its listeners from death and terror, through emergent order and delight in nature’s beauty, to a passionate, glowing musical enactment of heavenly bliss. That, in a nutshell, was Jaap van Sweden’s NY Phil legacy – shepherding the orchestra through the annus horribilis of the Covid-19 pandemic, to a bright new future with maestro Dudamel. Thank you Jaap!
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.