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Thus Spoke the Juilliard Orchestra & Gustav Mahler at Carnegie Hall
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 09 March 2026 15:22
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Rachel Papo, courtesy of Juilliard
At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, on the night of Monday, April 14th, 2025 I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb performance of Gustav Mahler’s titanic Symphony No. 3 in D Minor from 1896, played by the impressive Juilliard Orchestra—admirably conducted by the accomplished David Robertson—assisted by the excellent Juilliard Community Chorus and the Juilliard Preparatory Division Chorus, under the direction of Adrian O. Rodríguez.
In instructive notes on the program by Thomas May—credited as “the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival,” a writer “about the arts for a wide variety of publications,” and the author of books including Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader—he provides some useful background on the piece:
The longest of Gustav Mahler's symphonies, the Third takes an all-encompassing perspective that, in the composer's words, “goes to the very heart of existence, where one must feel every tremor of the world and of God.” It culminates in a suprahuman vision of love as the driving force of “a Universe where everything lives and must and will live.”
Composition stretched over two summers (1895–1896), but the complete work was not premiered until June 1902, under the composer's baton, at a festival in Krefeld, Germany. In the interim, Mahler vacillated over titles proposed for each of the six movements, eventually settling on an outline comprising two parts: Part I, “Pan Awakes/Summer Marches In (Procession of Bacchus),” the monumental first movement (over one-third of the entire symphony's duration); and Part II, consisting of five movements: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,” “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me,” “What Humanity Tells Me,” “What the Angels Tell Me,” and “What Love Tells Me.” Several movements were initially presented independently or in smaller groupings, but for the 1902 premiere, Mahler rejected programmatic titles altogether.
The initial movement starts with a stirring, forceful, recurring fanfare—Mahler referred to this as “the wakeup call”—that is followed by a slow, somewhat lugubrious section that has an inchoate quality; music of a contrastingly more sprightly, sometimes pastoral, character soon emerges alongside a protracted funeral march—the jostling of these two primary strands constitutes the main body of the movement. Some passages are indeed celestial and it reaches a spirited finish. The annotator astutely comments that “Mahler anticipates the ambivalent creative force of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, in which the promise of renewed fertility is inseparable from barbaric, destructive impulses,” adding that “Remarkably, Mahler composed this music after he had written Part II.”
The next movement—a graceful and enchanting minuet—is a vehicle for a more familiar Romanticism; it ends abruptly but happily and peacefully. About the third movement, May records that “Mahler based its first part on an orchestral transcription of an earlier song setting of a text from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn” that inspired the composer’s first four symphonies. The movement begins cheerfully, even joyfully, and then intensifies; with the sounding of an offstage horn, a moment of serenity is briefly achieved but more dynamic music displaces this at the close.
The haunting fourth movement is an orchestral lyric that was beautifully sung by the wonderful mezzo-soprano, Samantha Hankey, a Juilliard graduate. The annotator explains:
Here, Mahler sets an excerpt from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra— the “Midnight Song” or “Drunken Song”—representing the moment when Zarathustra has his epiphany of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche's idea—that one must affirm all of existence, knowing it will recur infinitely— acknowledges the suffering coursing through the first movement, without the illusion of an afterlife to explain it.
The ringing of bells inaugurates the enchanting, largely celebratory, choral, fifth movement; about it, May remarks that “Another Wunderhorn text introduces another vision of paradise: a welcoming place open even to sinners, so long as they love God.” In the last movement, the music once again ascends to an æthereal, more purely spiritual register, although there are urgent and even disquieting moments; the annotator adverts to the brass chorale that “echoes the fanfare that opened the symphony, ushering in a proclamation of heavenly assurance that brings the Third to its blissful conclusion.”
The artists, justly, were enthusiastically applauded.
March '26 Digital Week I
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 05 March 2026 01:37
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Orchestra of St. Luke’s Present Haydn at Carnegie Hall
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 02 March 2026 14:37
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Chris Lee
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, February 12th, I had the privilege to attend a superb concert—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the accomplished direction of Andrew Manze.
The event started auspiciously with a sterling account of Franz Joseph Haydn’s marvelous Symphony No. 47 in G Major, “The Palindrome,” from 1772. The initial Allegro is charming and elegant, with more urgent moments, while the ensuing slow movement, marked Un poco adagio cantabile, is more subdued with a greater solemnity and an increasing intensity—its intricate contrapuntal writing is especially impressive and it finishes quietly.
The succeeding Menuetto e Trio provides the work with its familiar name since it is structured to “mirror itself backward and forward,” as explained by Ryan M. Prendergast, the program annotator; it is brief and more spirited, with a slower and statelier Trio section. The ebullient Finale, with a tempo of Presto assai, is the liveliest of all the movements and it concludes happily. The first half of the evening closed splendidly with an admirable rendition of the engaging Fearful Symmetries by John Adams from 1988, which was commissioned by this orchestra.
The second part of the program was equally strong, consisting of an extraordinary realization of Ludwig van Beethoven’s terrific Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 68, which was completed around 1806 and was here played by the exemplary virtuoso, Paul Lewis. The opening Allegro moderato begins with a brief, solo piano introduction echoed by the ensemble; the movement quickly builds in excitement but there are many less extroverted passages, even of sheer lyricism—after a dazzling cadenza, it ends with an enchanting coda. The Andante con moto that follows starts with pronounced gravity but the soloist’s part has a contrasting gentleness on the whole. The finale, marked Rondo vivace, is dance-like and exhilarating with some very passionate measures but with some very beautiful pianism sometimes in a more reflective, even song-like, register; it concludes exultantly.
The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.
Budapest Festival Orchestra Plays Mahler at Carnegie Hall
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 02 March 2026 14:21
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Fadi Kheir
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Saturday, February 7th, I had the exceptional privilege of attending a magnificent concert presented by Carnegie Hall—the second of two on consecutive days and one of the best I have ever been to—featuring the extraordinary Budapest Festival Orchestra, under the inestimable direction of Iván Fischer, one of the world’s finest conductors. Also on the stage were a superb mezzo-soprano, Gerhild Romberger, and two marvelous choruses: the Trebles of Westminster Choir, directed by Donald Nally, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, led by Elizabeth Núñez.
The event consisted of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s seldom played, monumental Symphony No. 3 in D Minor, which completed its final revision in 1906.
About the work, the composer explained that “each movement stands alone.” After going to its premiere in 1902, Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Mahler as follows:
I think I have experienced your symphony. I felt the struggle for illusions; I felt the pain of one disillusioned; I saw the forces of evil and good contending; I saw a man in a torment of emotion exerting himself to gain inner harmony. I sensed a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth!
Mahler stated that the piece “doesn’t keep to the traditional form in any way, but to me, ‘symphony’ means constructing a world with all the technical means at one’s disposal. The eternally new and changing content determines its own form.”
The original subtitles for the movements, which the composer later removed, were:
- A Summer Morning’s Dream: Introduction: Awakening of Pan, Summer enters, Procession of Bacchus
- What the flowers in the meadow tell me
- What the animals in the forest tell me
- What man tells me
- What the angels tell me
- What love tells me
But, Mahler also said, “I know that as long as I can sum up my experience in words, I can certainly not create music about it.” And further: “Because of its manifold variety, this work, in spite of its duration … is short, in fact, of the greatest concision.”
The extremely long and ambitious initial movement starts dramatically with a fanfare and many portentous measures of a sometimes more inchoate character; eventually, music of a much sunnier variety displaces the gloom, building to a climax followed by a more tentative sequence that ushers in an episode of greater agitation and urgency. Another series of fanfares inaugurates another interlude of uncertainty that precedes an affirmative, march-like section that finishes triumphantly. In Mahler’s 1896 comments on the symphony, he said about this movement that it “has almost ceased to be music; it is hardly anything but sounds of nature.”
The subsequent, exquisite minuet opens charmingly and much of it has a playful, usually gentle quality; it closes softly. The succeeding scherzando is ludic too as well as joyful—a distant, posthorn solo has a certain restlessness but is evocative of a more serene perspective that moves to the foreground before the movement concludes animatedly. Citing the 1896 remarks of the composer, Jack Sullivan, in his excellent notes on the program, describes “the coda of the scherzando” as “a sudden falling again of these ‘heavy shadows of inanimate nature’ before the ‘great leap upward into the more spiritual realm.’”
The radiant fourth movement is, according to the annotator, “a misterioso nocturne for contralto on the ‘Drunken Song’ from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra.” The jubilant, enchanting, choral movement that ensues—which, as Sullivan says, “omits strings entirely”—has transcendent moments; it is a setting of a text from the early 19th-century, Romantic anthology compiled by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which provides a general framework uniting Mahler’s first four symphonies and was a source of inspiration for many other compositions from the first phase of his career.
In 1896, Mahler said that in the adagio finale, “God can only be understood as love,” and that: “What was heavy and rigid at the beginning has, at the end, advanced to the highest state of consciousness; inarticulate sounds have become the most perfectly articulated speech.” The movement has an extended, hushed beginning that subtly transitions to music of greater emotional intensity that climaxes before again slowly ascending to a vision of heavenly fulfillment, ending with a grand apotheosis.
The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.
