Voice of taxi driver: Where to?
Female passenger: Carnegie Hall, please.
[music]
Voice of box office: Okay, here are your tickets. Enjoy the show.
Voice of usher: Your tickets please. Follow me.
[music]
Jeff Spurgeon: In New York City, there are lots of ways to get to Carnegie Hall; a subway, a taxi, a walk down 57th Street. You have just found another way to get to America's most famous home for classical music. Welcome to Carnegie Hall Live, the broadcast series that gives you a front-row seat to concerts by some of the greatest artists in the world, and you hear the performances exactly as they happen. You are part of the audience sharing the experience of music-making at Carnegie Hall. I'm Jeff Spurgeon backstage at Carnegie Hall, and of course, alongside is John Schaefer.
John Schaefer: We are here backstage in and among the members of The Philadelphia Orchestra, an ensemble that is no stranger to Carnegie Hall. They've only brought a single piece with them tonight, but it's a big one. Mahler's Symphony No. 6. If you're trying to think, "Now, which one is that again?"
Jeff Spurgeon: [laughs]
John Schaefer: It's the one with the big hammer at the end of the symphony in the fourth movement. Two huge hammer blows.
Jeff Spurgeon: Leading the ensemble tonight is the orchestra's music and artistic director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, arguably one of the busiest people in the classical music world. Positions at the Metropolitan Opera, Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal, and with tonight's ensemble, The Philadelphia Orchestra as well.
John Schaefer: Just as Yannick and The Philadelphians are no strangers to Carnegie Hall, they are also no strangers to Mahler, which makes it a little unusual that the last time they performed this symphony, Symphony No. 6, was back in 2012. When we spoke to Yannick Nézet-Séguin earlier today, we asked him how his understanding of this symphony had changed over the last dozen or so years.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin: Every time I take a piece of music, even if it's six months later, I always feel how much I have changed, so you can only imagine 15 years later, for a piece like this. I especially bring more attention now in my interpretation to the finale, which I believe is the most treacherous of all, maybe all of the Mahler movements in all of his symphonies.
The architecture of this is so difficult to get, and we use one full rehearsal only on that finale just to make sure that we knew our strategy together, how to differentiate all the paragraphs and why does it keep coming back, why do we have two of those hammers and not four? I mean, this is what's changed, and I'm more attached than ever to the clarity of the score, and as a result, I think it goes deeper in the emotion. The younger Yannick would always have prioritized the emotional content, and I still do, but I now know, at the tender age of 50, that if the form is more taken care of, especially in a symphony like the Sixth, if the clarity is more there, then it goes much deeper in the emotional content.
Jeff Spurgeon: That's the youthful conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra, the 50-year-old Yannick Nézet-Séguin, speaking about the progression of his understanding of Mahler's Symphony No. 6. In just a few moments, Nézet-Séguin will take the stage with The Philadelphia Orchestra. You can hear them all practicing on stage, even right now, and then they'll bring you an epic 70 minutes of music, the Sixth Symphony of Gustav Mahler, nicknamed the Tragic Symphony, or at least nicknamed that sometimes, not always.
In fact, storied conductor Bruno Walter, though, thought that description fit the piece perfectly. To quote him, he said, "The piece reeks of the bitter cup of human life. Existence is a burden, death is desirable, life hateful," said Bruno Walter. That might be this symphony's motto.
John Schaefer: So yeah, a nice light-hearted piece.
Jeff Spurgeon: [laughs]
John Schaefer: Despite the heaviness of this symphony, actually Mahler wrote it during a pretty happy time in his life, during a composing holiday with his wife Alma and child in the Austrian mountains, and that disconnect between the darkness of this symphony and the joy in his personal life might seem a little odd at first, but Marina Mahler, Gustav Mahler's granddaughter, has a bit of a different take on that.
Marina Mahler: I don't understand why people always ask, "Well, why, when he was so happy, did he write all that about suffering?" Well, I mean, it seems to me quite logical and normal because suffering is not just your own, it's not just your own life. It's the general human state of being. It's something that everyone has, and you can't avoid it. There's enough suffering in the world to fill books and music scores until the end of the world, if there is such a thing. Because suffering is a general thing, and you only have to look and be aware to know how much of it there is.
That's why he was so close to Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, and it meant a lot. It was his favorite book, and it was all about suffering and redemption, really. That's why he gives solace and hope and beauty to so many, because he walked through that vale of sorrow for everybody, if you like. The immense suffering that he intimated and could express liberates people because they can then feel that with him and then live it in that way.
Jeff Spurgeon: That is the voice of Marina Mahler. She is the granddaughter of Gustav Mahler, speaking about her grandfather's work in the Sixth Symphony. We owe a word of thanks to our colleague at New York Public Radio, Aaron Cohen, who had that interview with Marina Mahler, part of his podcast series on the Mahler symphonies, podcast series called Embrace Everything.
John Schaefer: Speaking of embracing everything, while late seating occurs here at Carnegie Hall and before we embark on this journey through the Symphony No. 6, let's hear a little bit of a live performance here at Carnegie Hall of the conclusion of the Symphony No. 9, which does appear to embrace everything. You get a sense of the scope, the scale of Mahler's ambition and imagination in this Symphony No. 9.
[MUSIC - The Philadelphia Orchestra: Mahler's Symphony No. 9]
Jeff Spurgeon: Music the size of the cosmos, a moment near the conclusion of the Symphony No. 9 of Gustav Mahler, a symphony which, in spite of its embracing everything, is still of a flavor that is a little more on the optimistic side than the work that we are about to hear from The Philadelphia Orchestra in just a couple of moments here at Carnegie Hall, Mahler's Symphony No. 6.
John Schaefer: Jeff, you mentioned the nickname, the Tragic. That is a name that Mahler seems to have applied after the fact and then thought better of it and withdrew it, insisted there was no program to the symphony. When we asked Yannick Nézet-Séguin earlier today about this work and performing, we asked what it was like to play a piece that has such an ambiguous background to it.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin: It is a conundrum, and yet I feel like the more I conduct Mahler, I try to treat it more like a Brahms symphony, let's put it this way. I think it's already so charged that I feel like his own relationship to it becomes I wouldn't say secondary, but especially--, and let me already bring you to this, I feel like Mahler, over 100 years later, is speaking to us, more relevant than ever, more accurately.
I always considered him to be such a visionary and of course was one of the most misunderstood during his lifetime because of that, but it was true in the '60s, in the '70s, the '80s, and now it's even more true, and it's scary, it's frightening, especially this Sixth Symphony, so I prefer to have these references and talking to the musicians about that instead of really the program.
Jeff Spurgeon: Yannick Nézet-Séguin speaking about how he approaches a piece such as this Mahler Sixth. Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler's wife, also talked a lot about this work and the supposed meaning behind some of the happenings in the symphony. She said that the final movement hammerschlag, the hammer strokes, were in fact blows of fate, defeating an archetypal hero on the third blow, but Mahler then revised the symphony a few times after the premiere, changing the number of hammer blows from five to three to two, so forth.
John Schaefer: There is also a bit of controversy over the order of the inner movements, the second and third movements.
Jeff Spurgeon: Right.
John Schaefer: Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphians will play the Scherzo as the second movement, and the slower movement, the Andante, in the third spot. The first and the fourth are fixed, of course. The members of The Philadelphia Orchestra out on stage here at Carnegie Hall and tuning up-- Actually, we should say they're not all on stage. Immediately to my left is one of the percussionists. There is an offstage bell part in the first movement of the piece.
Jeff Spurgeon: Some cowbells and some chimes.
John Schaefer: I've got my earplugs in. [crosstalk]
Jeff Spurgeon: Will Ferrell is not here tonight either, so the cowbell amount will be carefully regulated for sure. Concert master David Kim tuning up the orchestra as Maestro Nézet-Séguin backstage here says, "More cowbell." Well, we'll see that, and the rest of the symphony are up to him, and The Philadelphia Orchestra now. The stage door opens and out he goes.
[applause]
Jeff Spurgeon: Music director and artistic director of The Philadelphia Orchestra, busy in Montreal as well and at New York's Metropolitan Opera and a very popular musician, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the members of The Philadelphia Orchestra on their feet, about to bring you a great journey in Mahler, the Symphony No. 6 of Gustav Mahler from Carnegie Hall live.
[MUSIC - Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the members of The Philadelphia Orchestra: Mahler's Symphony No. 6]
Jeff Spurgeon: From Carnegie Hall Live, you have just heard a performance of the Symphony No. 6 of Gustav Mahler by the Philadelphia Orchestra and their musical and artistic director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Backstage at Carnegie Hall, I'm Jeff Spurgeon alongside John Schaefer. That last movement, John, had power and unity and a relentless, and we might say it, tragic arc to its end.
John Schaefer: A very ambiguous, ambivalent feeling towards the end.
Jeff Spurgeon: Yes, the sun appears to shine almost a lot.
John Schaefer: Yes. Throughout this work, you have streaks of the pastoral nature of Mahler. The horn calls, the offstage cow bells, and tubular bells performed literally just a foot or two to our left here backstage at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nézet-Séguin acknowledging the heroic efforts of the Philadelphia Orchestra in this epic-length work. It's epic both in its length and in the emotional roller coaster it puts you through, whether you are the listener or one of the musicians in the orchestra.
Jeff Spurgeon: As we heard from Mahler's granddaughter, Marina Mahler, she talked about the idea that Mahler, in understanding the way to present sorrow and suffering in music, allows the audience, the listener, to experience those emotions as well.
John Schaefer: To experience them in a distinctly different way, of course, because it is art, not journalism. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is back out center stage and now pointing to various members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which may take a while.
Jeff Spurgeon: It may indeed. Four trombones, the low brass acknowledged there. Four trombones in the tuba. An enormous group of trumpets.
John Schaefer: Six of them in all.
Jeff Spurgeon: Yes. The eight French horns that Mahler calls for in this score.
John Schaefer: Quintuple wins. Five each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, including bass and contra members of all of those different families. Two harps.
Jeff Spurgeon: No, four.
John Schaefer: Four?
Jeff Spurgeon: There are four harps on that stage.
John Schaefer: Calls for two.
Jeff Spurgeon: Two in the score, but four on stage. It was an enormous sweeping sound that they all made, and a beautiful one, too.
John Schaefer: A large percussion battery, which included the famous hammer blow.
Jeff Spurgeon: Battery is the word that hammer blow achieved by various means by different orchestras.
John Schaefer: Every orchestra has to figure out how to do what Mahler wanted, because what he did not want was a metal hammer hitting anvil. This is not a Giuseppe Verdi anvil chorus.
Jeff Spurgeon: You didn't want something that would ring out for a long time. It was a strike, a blow.
John Schaefer: A thud.
Jeff Spurgeon: Yes.
John Schaefer: Like the blow of an axe is the way Mahler put it. Every orchestra needs to figure out for themselves how they're going to do that. The Philadelphia Orchestra came up with a big wooden box. Jeff, you described it as looking like something out of an 8th-grade shop project.
Jeff Spurgeon: It really is. It's a wooden box. It's about a yard, a cube, a yard on each side. It's made of half inch plywood reinforced by two by fours and wood screws. You put another layer of plywood on top of that and smack it with a great big log about 5 inches in diameter.
John Schaefer: It's a big mallet. It's not nearly as heavy as it looks. You wouldn't want to strike your thumb with it, but it's not a comically large hammer.
Jeff Spurgeon: Which you can see in some performances.
John Schaefer: Yes. In this case, it got the job done. Mahler was very careful about the telling details of his pieces. He started out with five hammer blows, knocked it down to three, and eventually down to the two that we heard. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, now turning to face the audience here at Carnegie Hall, asking the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra to stand and to share in the applause with him after this ride that we have taken through Mahler's Symphony No. 6.
Jeff Spurgeon: A deeply powerful work, and one that was written by Mahler at a happy time in his life. Those contradictions continue to be devil analysts of this music and listeners of it, too, understanding exactly what Mahler was saying and where those messages came from. We've certainly heard them all tonight in a performance by this very large Philadelphia Orchestra on stage tonight to bring this single work to an audience at Carnegie Hall.
John Schaefer: That wraps up this live broadcast. Carnegie Hall Live. Our thanks to Clive Gillinson and the staff here at Carnegie Hall. WQXR's team includes engineers George Wellington, Duke Marcos, Bill Siegmund, Neil Shaw, and Noriko Okabe. Our production team, Lauren Purcell-Joiner, Eileen Delahunty, and Laura Boyman. Our project director is Christine Herskovits. I'm John Schaefer.
Jeff Spurgeon: I'm Jeff Spurgeon. Carnegie Hall Live is a co-production of Carnegie Hall and WQXR in New York. Classical New York is WQXR 105.9 FM and HD Newark 90.3 FM, WQXW Ossining, and WNYC FM HD 2. We send you back now to the WQXR for WQXR studio for more music hosted by Miyan Levenson.
[01:42:38] [END OF AUDIO]
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