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Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra presents Masterful Mahler
Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director Neal Gittleman dismisses the superstition rampant in classical music that ninth symphonies are jinxed.
“Because Beethoven died soon after his ninth, there’s this notion of the ‘jinx’ of the ninth symphony,” Gittleman said. “It says that nobody gets to write a tenth.
“Of course, Mozart wrote his ninth symphony when he was nine years old and Haydn wrote a hundred and six. But after Beethoven there was this myth and Gustav Mahler was at least aware of it.”
On Friday and Saturday, Feb. 27 and 28, Gittleman and the DPO will devote an entire evening to Mahler’s “Symphony No. 9 in D Major” at the Miami Valley & Good Samaritan Hospitals Classical Series: Masterful Mahler at Schuster Center. It will be one continuous performance with no intermission.
As it turned out, Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 was the last symphony he wrote and is arguably the most intense of his symphonic works. “It’s one of the deepest, emotional and, I think, beautiful pieces ever written,” Gittleman said. “It’s a piece I’ve wanted to do but not one I ever considered doing in my youth.”
Gittleman said now that he’s two years older than Mahler was when he (Mahler) died, there is “no sense waiting.”
“Mahler wrote it at a time when he was thinking about death in a more serious way,” Gittleman said. “For most of his life, death was an abstraction but after he lost a child it was no longer an abstraction. It’s someone who desperately loved life but realizes he can’t cling to it forever.”
Sylistically, the conductor describes Mahler’s 80-minute opus as “Romanticism or maybe a goodbye to Romanticism.”
“It’s so complex and there are so many things going on,” Gittleman explained. “If you play the chords on the piano they sound really dissonant. But the way he voices them in the orchestra, it never really departs from traditional romantic harmony. It’s very intense but you never lose the perspective of the romantic tonal framework.
“There are some people who say you have the beginnings of atonality. I don’t hear that at all. If you pull out isolated bits and just play them in isolation you can say ‘that’s really wierd.’ But when you hear it in context they are lines moving in different directions and you don’t perceive it in the same way.”
HOW TO GO What: Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra’s Miami Valley & Good Samaritan Hospitals Classical Series: Masterful Mahler When: Friday, Feb. 27 and Saturday, Feb. 28. 8 p.m. Where: Schuster Center How Much: Tickets $62 to $12 call (937) 228-3630. For More Information: Call (937) 224-3521
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2167 or kmoss@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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