For the next event in their International Series, the Community Arts-Music Association (CAMA) has teamed up with the Music Academy of the West to co-sponsor bringing to town one of the world’s greatest ensembles, the London Symphony Orchestra, for a concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 18, in the Granada Theater.
The London Symphony will be conducted by its new chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, with stellar Dutch fiddler Janine Jansen as guest soloist.
Note: There will be no late seating for this concert.
The program consists of two works: Leonard Bernstein‘s “‘Serenade’ for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp & Percussion, after Plato’s ‘Symposium’” (1954), Janine Jansen, violin soloist; and Gustav Mahler‘s “Symphony No. 1 in D-Major” (1888).
The Bernstein is an elegant choice to introduce the Mahler, Lenny having introduced the composer to the postwar generations, embarking on a project not only to perform all nine symphonies, and eventually the song cycles, but to record them all (on vinyl, at 33-1/3 rpm, for the Mahler revival was closely connected to the technology behind the long-playing record, with as much as half-an-hour of music on one side).
Lenny’s band, during the years when he was a force of nature in the music world, was the New York Philharmonic, where Mahler himself had been music director (1909-11).
If that wasn’t connection enough, when Bernstein made his path-finding recording of the huge “Symphony No. 8, the ‘Symphony of a Thousand,’” the orchestra he used was the London Symphony Orchestra. It was Lenny’s recording of the Mahler “Third” that made an addict of me.
That said, the “Serenade” is not particularly “Mahlerian” — indeed, though Mahler’s influence can be heard everywhere in the Bernstein oeuvre, I have never caught him trying to write imitation Mahler: he would have had to reconstruct Mahler’s world to do that, and Mahler’s world was blown to smithereens by the guns of August 1914.
The “Serenade” has a classical feel to it; the typically lovely Bernstein melodies are woven into a sparse, Haydn-like context. It deserves to be better known, and we should be grateful to Jansen and Pappano for putting the full prestige of the LSO behind it.
Mahler is Mahler from the first. “Das Klagende Lied” cantata, composed nearly a decade before the “First Symphony,” already inhabits the Mahler soundscape; it literally could not have been written by anybody else.
Neither could the “First Symphony,” in which the most beautiful lied from “Songs of a Wayfarer,” “The Two Blue Eyes,” appears in the middle of the famous third movement funeral march, “Frére Jacques” in a minor key, a round as a dirge.
And the opening of the first movement, which recreates the mood created by the first rays of the morning sun, tells you right away that the man knows what he is doing.
Lead sponsors for this concert are Linda and Michael Keston; Principal Sponsor is the Herbert & Elaine Kendall Foundation. Other sponsors are Beth Gates Warren and Bob Boghosian, Alison and Jan Bowlus, Judith L. Hopkinson, Sara Miller McCune, Ellen and Peter Johnson, Ellen and Thomas Orlando; Co-sponsors are Alice and Todd Amspoker, Elizabeth and Andrew Butcher, Meg and Dan Burnham, Dennis and Frederika Emory, and the Zegar Family Foundation.
We are all beholden.
Tickets for the London Symphony Orchestra are $13-$173, and can be purchased at the Granada Box Office online at www.ticketing.granadasb.org/19372/19380, by phone 805-899-2222, or in person at 1214 State St.