It never ceases to amaze me that critics can respond to a specific performance with such different takes. Sometimes I have trouble believing I was at the same concert as these other guys.
This morning’s Times review of the recent appearances in New York by Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra is a case in point. Nobody is a bigger fan of Rattle than I am, and I agree that his version of Mahler’s Tenth with the LSO (I missed, alas, their Ninth) was indeed splendid—as splendid as I expected it to be, having heard him do the same piece with the Berlin Philharmonic a few years ago. But to say, as James Oestreich did this morning, that their performance of Das Lied von der Erde was a low point in the three-concert series, a veritable “disappointment,” beggars the imagination. What could Oestreich possibly have wanted if Christian Gerhaher’s deeply moving singing did not send him into chills of quiet ecstasy?
What Gerhaher did, and what Rattle—by toning down the orchestra to a mere whisper at times—allowed him to do, was to return the song to its essential meaning, as both a celebration of life on earth and a poignant farewell to it. The tenor, Stuart Skelton, handled most of the celebratory part, as he was meant to do; but it was in Gerhaher’s delicate, uncanny, piercingly beautiful rendering of the song’s darker and more melancholy aspects that Mahler’s genius emerged most strongly. Particularly in the final section, “Der Abschied” (literally, “Farewell”), this marvelous baritone’s precise diction and riveting control of his breath and voice made the account of this parting—of friend from friend, of man from world—much more heartbreaking than it normally is. Assisted by the supertitles, and craning our ears to hear Gerhaher’s every word, we in the audience were able to glean an unusually full sense of how much the earth’s glories can mean to those who sense their own mortality. Can this possibly be the same Mahler piece that Oestreich labeled “a work that little rewards understatement or great subtlety”?
Gerhaher did not sing softly because he has a weak voice suited only to intimate lieder, as Oestreich implied. I have heard him fully take over the stage in the Berlin Staatsoper’s Tannhäuser, so I know what he can do when he wants to sing at full strength. But here he was doing something that, in its own way, was even more dramatic. He was inhabiting the role of the-man-saying-farewell as if he were not only an acclaimed singer but also a skilled actor—an actor with the ability to put across every meaningful word even as he mused quietly to himself. We who sat in Geffen Hall on that Sunday afternoon, the privileged bystanders to this contemplation, knew full well that we were hearing something we would likely never hear again: a singer voicing these words as if he were in the process of inventing them, and the music to go with them, at that very moment. This illusion, if that’s the right word, was supported in full by the orchestra and the conductor, who collaborated in suggesting that the whole overwhelming performance was coming out of that one slight body. No wonder we all sat silent after it was over, as Gerhaher’s final “ewig…ewig…” faded into the air—his sung phrase explicitly evoking eternity even as it demonstrated its own evanescence.