Generally one should not review high school students playing. Even
students in a prep school. However, when the results of their labors are
so promising, and the conductor is one Benjamin Zander, working through his
ideas of Mahler 9 - exceptions should be made. The performance Friday, to
be repeated this Sunday, in Jordan Hall of the Youth Philharmonic under
Benjamin Zander is one of these.

The Youth Philharmonic is the orchestra of the New England Conservatory's
prepertory school. This particular kind of insitution should exist more
broadly, and recruite far more agressively. Every music teacher in the
country should have an eye and an ear out for promising talent so that we
do not read - "Oh I didn't know classical music until late in college" on
so many biographies.

Of the first work on the program - a composition by a student - little
needs to be said. Students should get their works played, frequently, and
then accept the criticism that comes. This is how one learns. They should
not, however, be allowed to write their own program notes. The results are
an aping of the worst habits of the eldars. The composer/pianist is one
Cynthia Kwong. She has been studying Stravinski's early neo-classical
period, and is still dizzy with the impact it makes.  Though not Gillespie.

The main item on the program was the 9th Symphony of Gustav Mahler. From
the opening notes it was clear that a conductor does make a difference.
These are high school students, talented and well trained - but filled with
all of the gaps that being young and talented leave in ones apparatus. But
from the first there were no missed ques of any consequence - until late in
the last movement - there was perpetually clear musical motivation behind
every climax, every leading nte was underlined correctly, every harmonic
turn correctly introduced and resolved. In short this was, in its basic
mechanical details, a better performance than many professional orchestras
turn in - not because of the quality of the players, but be cause of the
quality of the conducting. At the very moment of this performance, across
the way, a telegenic and well meaning young man was flailing his way
through a program of much simpler music, with much more accomplished
musicians.  To name names - critics darling's such as Bolle, Spano and
Pittman - as well as Lockhart of the Pops and Jaarvi of Detriot - have all
trasped through and delivered less with more.

First there is basic stick work. Any aspiring conductor would do very well
to examine Zander's closely.. Precise bounces off of the beat line, exact
turns between the beat patterns. Not for minutes on end, but every single
time. The left hand, such a flurry of activity under Ozawa, was often limp
by his side - everything having been worked out in advance, the players
need merely play in time and with ensemble. There were no lapses in the
precise regime from one end of the evening to the other.

The second is understanding. In a composer such as Mahler, one versed in,
and adoring, every detail of the tonal practice of harmony as it had
recently matured in Wagner's hands, will never introduce a modulation cold,
never avoid signalling a dissonance correctly, never engage ina clumsy
substitution or rotation of a chord. Hence the goal tones are always
clearly outlined bya smooth web of counterpoint. These important structural
notes must be empahisized - sometimes Mahler does so by orchestration or
dynamics, but sometimes one must merely understand. Each and every time
Zander did this. Hence, despite the diffuse nature of Mahler's symphonic
argument in the first movment - which in almost Sibelian fashion builds to
a point out of motivic fragments - there was never a section out of place
and no listener felt "lost".

The next tier up is range of technique, and here we began to run into the
limitaitons of student musicians. The best players there were up to the
technical task, particularly the first violist in her many solos, and the
concertmaster - who received ample thanks from the podium. But the general
level was not able to deliver the kind of screaming pitch of tension or
abyssmal pit of despair. They have felt it, to be sure, but have not yet
the skill to translate what they have felt into coherent musical motions.
They still sieze up a bit when asked for boundless joy, nor do they always
recognise pure sarcasm.

This lead to a mushiness of dynamic range, often caused by the simple
failure of not being confident. Climax is not just volume - but a shift in
bowing. Either from full to thin in the case of a major to minor shift, or
from thin to full, in the case of one of the great "sun bursts through the
clouds" moments which abound in Mahler's work.

This needs to be measured against the symphony, and particularly Zander's
conception of it. Zander points out that the premotions of death run deep
in this symphony, it is filled with sarcastic parody of popular culture,
but with a more clear death's mask placed over it - its redemption is a
resignation that trails off into silence. His program notes make it clear
that he perceives it as mere forerunner to the Second Vienna School in
almost every aspect. He clearly hunges to conduct some of Schoenberg's
pantonal period works. This he should do, since it will help the works,
and help clear some of the weight he is currently placing on Mahler.

To fulfill this conception requires an orchestra capapble of grat
virtuosity of technique, with complete mastery of placement of the bow -
closer to the bridge in someplaces, over the neck in others - complete
control of all of the nuances of wind and brass playing. These students,
naturally, have not learned to match up their emotions and the effects they
desire so precisely with particular technical means, though there were some
shining moments among the flutes and horns which indicate that there is a
brilliant future for many - if not most - of these players.

This conception also requires that he divorce the work from his
conception of the Second Vienna school - a school that was young,
theatrical, and of the future at that point. In too many cases he heard
Webern's intellectuallism in emotional thinly scored passages, and he heard
Scheonberg's contrapunctalism in passages that were supposed to be without
linear definition. This being said, the conception which Zander has is one
capable of bearing the weight of the music, and organising every detail of
exectution. The player always knows where in the story he is, and how far
from the center of the action, and is, in this way, able to endow every
action with its correct, and independant, motivation.

The symphonies arch is thus - an Adagio style first movement, which relies
on suggested repetition and expedition rather than development.  Even in
its most agressive moments, were are never bombarded with the rhymical
playing out which is the heart of an Allegro movement. This might have been
a criticism in the hands of a 19th century critic. But Mahler, despite his
radically conservative orchestra and patina of the age of Brahms, is not
writing purely 19th century music any more. The implications of Brucker's
symphonies, of Wagner's scenes has been accepted. This implication is no
more and no less than the idea that so long as there is a formal coherence,
that the larger work can be built of movements of any type.

This long movment moves restlessly between large sections devoted to the
strings, and wind sections which have only minimal, or solo, string
involvement at most. This pattern is an extreme version of Beethoven and
Haydn - strings as the carriers of the work, alternating with wind
sections. Mahler's contribution to the form is to pare the wind sections
down to their essential combinations of sound in the pianissmo or dominant
sections - and to have a sequential structure of climaxes for the tutti and
string sectioon, so that there is a long chord progression which manifests
itself at each tutti section, and whose movment and resolution forms a very
audible middle ground for the work.

The second movement is a distant relative of the Scherzo of the first
Symphony Mahler decided to number. It is the waltz stripped of every
gesture to hid the essential simplicity. The cultural comment, for those
that miss it - is that the popular culture of the day is essentially
simplcitic and unsaisfying, and divorced from its roots in naturalness. And
that it maintains itself by elaborate spectacle and device. File this under
"the more things change". Essential to play the movement is humor. One must
laugh at the sound of the bassoons twiddling and the horns twaddling. To
the players credit, the could almost always catch the comical reediness
required and the pompous billowing. The thin philanderer and fat cuckhold
argue gracelessly on the floor. Ah but Mahler was the cuckhold here, and
the bitterness of the failrue of conventional romance - for the Laendler is
the courting dance of the age - extends to the bitterness of the failure of
its social consequence - romantic marriage.

The third movement is neighbor to Strauss and Berlioz - the criticism of
the critics by making a joke of their sacred form - the fugue. The most
pungent example in Mahler's output, it sits next to the last movement
fugato of Symphonie Fantastique - with its whirling witches - and the
cackling critics of Strauss' Eb symphony. Here, however, Mahler's comment
is also socially relevant. Having attacked the first pillar of the
Victorian/Bizmarkian age, the genre of the peasant romance - he now attacks
the second - academicism. The academicism which had classified languages
and discovered the idea of Indo-European, which had classified plants and
discovered evolution, which was classifying dreams and discovering the
unconscious, which classified symphonies by a particular format. The key to
bringing this out is allowing the entracnes and fugal structure to emerge
from the ocean of sound like great whales that surface and submerge.
Obvious and powerful when they are seen, and unimaginably invisible when
deep below.

It is the last movement which must be regarded as, still, artistically
controversial. Does Mahler find solace and redemption at the end. Not
on this night with this conductor. Instead the nostaligc music - an
underpinning of the post-Romantic in Europe - never does reach the climatic
chord and then soft falling away which its genre demands. The trailing off
into the darkness, reminiscent of the opening, the ending of the first
movment, and every despairng thinly scored section in between, was played
as the final triump of the sense of smallness of the human soul agains tthe
vastness of the forces of history. For make no mistake, it is history that
is the main actor in this symphony. Cultural history, clearly alluded to by
genre in both the middle movements, and by reference to song melody in the
first, and by reference to the genre of soft string music in the last.

There is a job opening across the way. If the powers that be do not have
the will to appoint Boston's most promising conductor - Yoo - then let them
at least appoint its most distinguished conductor - Zander. That is unless
they fear that he might play Schoenberg well enough to win converts, and
play Mahler and Strauss well enough to demonstrate what a disappointment
Ozawa's recent tenure has been. Zander and Ozawa were both unknown
quantities in the mid 1970's when the first made an impact on Boston. Ozawa
with better technqiue at the podium, and Zander with a more analytical
mind. Ozawa with more charm, Zander with more charmisma. Ozawa has shrunk
over the years, becoming a fixture through which poured money. Zander has
grown. He has aquired the baton technique he lacked, he has learned some
finesse that he should have aquired from his mentors, he has polished his
ability to accept just compliments gracefully. Perhaps he makes other
uneasy because of his abundant messiah complex.

But then perhaps we are in need of someone willing to bear some thorns so
as to rise to that higher station.

Stirling Newberry <[log in to unmask]>