Mahler in Manchester

Category: Classical & Opera, Film & Cinema, Music.

Mahler’s kind of town

Manchester’s three orchestras collaborate on a major Mahler concert series at Bridgewater Hall

Extreme classical? If any composer truly deserves that description, it's Gustav Mahler. His music is red-blooded, substantial stuff – definitely not for the faint hearted.

“Anyone who's listening to it for the first time is struck by its directness... it grabs you by the throat!” says Peter Davison, Artistic Consultant at The Bridgewater Hall and an authority on Mahler. “He was a remarkable figure and certainly one of the first superstars of classical music in his day.”

Manchester's orchestras are celebrating the composer’s 150^th birthday year with a Mahler series running from January to June at The Bridgewater Hall. The BBC Philharmonic and the Hallé are joining forces to perform a complete cycle of the composer's ten symphonies, while Manchester Camerata will take on Mahler’s best known song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth). It's heaven for Mahler fans, as well as an incomparable opportunity for people who are less familiar with his music to get to know it.

Born in 1860, the Austrian composer is seen as a bridge between two centuries and two very different musical movements, the Romantics and the Modernists. The son of a Bohemian wine merchant, he rose from humble beginnings to find fame as a conductor, eventually converting to Catholicism at 37 in order to be able to serve as director of the Vienna State Opera, a prestigious post that under Austrian law could not be held by a Jew.

But his music, deeply personal and unabashedly philosophical, gradually took center stage. He drew ideas and inspiration from a hodgepodge of sources that included German philosophers, poems, Chinese literature, Jewish Klezmer music, the sounds of the countryside, and the mysticism of the church. He used his music to explore the big questions in his life, and express his own, often painful, emotional transformations.

His life was full of tragedy and difficulty. Eight of his 13 siblings died in childhood. His daughter died of diphtheria at four, and his own later life was troubled by a tempestuous relationship with his young wife Alma, and the heart disease which eventually killed him. Much of this sadness is there in his music, Davison says, but it is not without its moments of jubilation:

“It's very honest music. It hides nothing and covers an enormous range of human expression, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair,” Davison says. “But it's music that tells stories as well, at times there's a fairy tale quality to it, full of strange complexities and baffling things that seem familiar but you're not sure why. It's music that asks questions, and proposes answers, but sometimes seems to doubt them.”

The performances will be broadcast in sequence on BBC Radio 3, enabling listeners to follow Mahler's musical evolution. And, in an interesting twist to each programme, the orchestras have commissioned short new compositions that reflect on and respond to each symphony. Each will have its world première performance immediately before the symphony, giving audiences the chance to take in some new music along with the old.

Cornerhouse is getting into the Mahler act with showings of two films related to the composer, Luschino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice, with an all-Mahler soundtrack (Feb 7) and Ken Russell's biopic Mahler (May 2)

Follow along with the Mahler Festival on the festival's official blog, A View From the Podium, written by conductor Kenneth Woods, where you can read previews of each concert and background information about the music to be performed