MahlerMan reports - Day 1

Mahler is in Amsterdam. There he always is, in his way, but now he really seems to be there. You feel it and soon you will hear it too, at the third Mahler Festival. I am one of 2,000 Mahlerians in the hall, from the curious to the neurotic from all corners of the world.

It has something of a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage to the place where a saint performed miracles or appeared to believers. Granted: The Concertgebouw does have something of a cathedral, but relics are not there to my knowledge. No hairs Gustav pulled out of his head after uneven playing during a rehearsal. No piece of fingernail he bit off from sheer stress just before descending the grand staircase. No receipt from a pub crawl with Mengelberg or Diepenbrock. One miracle, though, is there: his oeuvre. Nine-and-a-half symphonies and a Lied von der Erde. The songs strewn across his work like the pebbles of Little Thumb. That inevitable piece of piano quartet, too. We'll get to hear it all, until next Sunday.

What will the atmosphere be like? What does it look like, a room full of Mahlerians? And what does it do to a person? Everyone has their story about Mahler; this festival will soon add a chapter to it.

The only other musical pilgrimage to which I can compare this is the Bayreuther Festival. Years ago, I went there for a performance of Lohengrin. Something with rats in the staging and Klaus Florian Vogt in the lead role. I was quite taken with Vogt, as were three-quarters of the audience. That cheered him passionately, then a hard core from the parterre booed him just as passionately. This went back and forth for a while: when the cheering stopped here, the booing started there and vice versa. It had a spatial effect reminiscent of Stockhausen. Gruppen for spectators or something like that. Imagine the same thing happening during this Mahler Festival, when Jaap van Zweden plays the andante as the second movement in the Sixth Symphony, or not.

Any pilgrim will tell you that it is not the destination that is most important, but the journey. The unexpected encounters with other pilgrims, the locals who casually offer you a bed for the night, the smell in dormitories, the life and suffering along the way. I have listened to as little Mahler as possible over the past few months, except for the excellent podcast Mahler! (with exclamation mark). In it, three incurable Mahlerians - Thomas Oliemans, Gijs Groenteman and Thomas de Jonker - comb through each symphony, like nerds in a boys' room writing out a “walkthrough” of a game. Thoroughly, very thoroughly, but without completely bare the crown. By all means, it helps you discover hidden gems. Take that completely off the cuff passage at the end of the Second Symphony, just before the choir sleepily murmurs ‘Auferstehen’. The apocalypse seems a fact, wounded trumpets in the distance, somewhere ahead a flutist and a piccolo player wander about, both shellshocked - hey, is a drone flying there? These are bars that had always eluded me and now never let me go. A miracle, too.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First the opening concert on Friday afternoon with songs, and in the evening the First Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Klaus Mäkelä. Spoiler alert: it is my favourite symphony.

Nicht schleppen,

Mahlerman