Yesterday afternoon the Met Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, performed works by Mozart and Mahler to begin their season of Sunday matinee concerts at Carnegie Hall.
The program opened with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467 (1785) and featured Maurizio Pollini as soloist. The concerto was an unusual choice. In a concert where one of Mahler's longer symphonies is to be performed, the opening piece, if indeed there is one, is most often a little known work chosen more for its brevity than any other reason. The Piano Concerto No. 21, of course, does not meet this criterion. Instead, it is deservedly one of Mozart's best known and most often recorded works. The second movement andante, in particular, is of haunting loveliness. (And yes, this was the music included on the soundtrack of the Swedish film Elvira Madigan that for years gave the entire concerto its nickname.)
The K. 467 was written in Vienna at the peak of Mozart's popularity as a pianist and is only one of the many concertos he wrote for that instrument during this period. Only a few weeks before, he had been soloist at the premiere of another masterpiece, the Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. If anything, despite its pleasant sound, the Piano Concerto No. 21 is an even more difficult work than its predecessor and serves as a test of any pianist's ability. The composer's father Leopold, who was visiting Vienna at the time of the premiere, described it as "astonishingly difficult." I thought Pollini yesterday handled the challenge brilliantly. I have seen this pianist often over the years and have always been impressed with his clear style of playing. Although he has been faulted by some critics for a lack of emotional involvement, he has always seemed to me totally caught up in the music at hand. Since none of Mozart's original cadenzas have survived, Pollini played those composed by Salvatore Sciarrino. As for Levine's conducting, he brought to this interpretation of Mozart's music the same insight and ability he demonstrated at the performance of Figaro I attended at the Met several weeks ago.
After intermission, the orchestra closed the concert with Mahler's Symphony No. 9 (1908-1909). Although this was not really the composer's last work - he in fact lived long enough to complete a substantial portion of the Symphony No. 10 - it certainly is his final word on the inevitability of death, a subject that had preoccupied him in one form or another all his life. This is one point on which all the commentators are in agreement. As Alban Berg wrote in 1912:
"This whole [first] movement is dominated by the presentiment of death, which makes itself known again and again over the movement's course. It is the culmination of everything on earth and in dreams, with ever more intense eruptions following the most gentle passages, and of course this intensity is strongest in the horrible moment where death becomes a certainty, where, in the middle of the deepest, most poignant longing for life, death makes itself known 'with the greatest violence.' Against that, there is no resistance."
And Leonard Bernstein is equally emphatic:
"The Ninth is the ultimate farewell … the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up."
Not that the entire symphony is one long funeral march. The second movement Ländler is a relaxed if idiosyncratic take on the Austrian folk dance and a reflection of the composer's intense love of nature. In the final movement, Mahler looks beyond death to new horizons in music itself. The symphony has no home key - the movements progress from D to C to A minor and finally end in D-flat. This abandonment of traditional tonality was to have a huge effect on Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School in the coming years.
I had seen Levine conduct this work with the Met Orchestra several years ago and thought this performance the better of the two. In fact, this was one of the best performances of Mahler I've heard in quite some time. In such a long work it is difficult for any conductor to maintain a level of intensity that keeps the audience on the edge of its seat throughout, but Levine here managed the feat quite well. His conducting, as far as I could tell, was flawless. The hushed ending of the final movement.was magical.
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