The Music Academy of the West’s 2018 Summer Festival will end with a bang — indeed, one of the biggest bangs in the Western symphonic repertory — in a Community Concert, presented in remembrance of Léni Fé Bland, at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 11, in the Santa Barbara Bowl.
Mosher guest artist Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will lead the Academy Festival Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorale (Grant Gershon, artistic director), mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, and soprano Susanna Phillips, in a performance of Gustav Mahler‘s “Symphony No. 2 in c-minor, ‘Resurrection’ (1894).”
For most American music lovers born just after World War II, who came of age in the 1960s, Gustav Mahler was the composer of the era, our joyous discovery — not as a replacement for Beethoven or Bach or whomever, but as an imperative expansion of the canon.
He was not the choice of the musical establishment, largely ensconced in academia by this point, nor of professional musicians.
The Mahler boom was never primarily a concert hall phenomenon, although his works began to appear on programs with increasing frequency, but was driven and sustained by long-playing records (12 inches, revolving thirty-three-and-a-third times per minute).
Despite the championing of such luminaries as Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter (both of whom had worked for the composer as his assistants), Mahler didn’t reach his true public until it was technically possible to hear an entire movement of one of his works without changing records.
We bought his records, we bourgeois teenagers, and we took them to our rooms and listened in solitude, without interruption — unless it was to be called for dinner.
Music isn’t very good with ideas, or with linear narratives, but it is the supreme condenser of emotion, and Mahler’s music, more than just about anybody else’s, speaks, unfiltered and with immense power, to the emotional life of the listener.
The catalyst was Leonard Bernstein, who, in 1960 (the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s birth), began a series of concerts in which he and the New York Philharmonic (where Mahler had been music director, 1907-08) played all the symphonies and song cycles, and — more important for the rest of the U.S. outside Manhattan — started recording them all for Columbia Records.
It is fitting that in this year of 2018, when Maestro Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are celebrating another centennial — that of Leonard Bernstein himself — we should have a chance to hear the greatest work of the composer whose music Lenny was more closely identified with than any but his own.
By 1970, Mahler was firmly lodged on the program. More and more recordings of his work were released, and purchased. Yet, as I look back now, Mahler seems most strongly linked to the years of the presidency of John F. Kennedy.
Lenny was a frequent guest at the White House, and high culture in general never had so much sincere support as it did then. On the night before the president’s funeral, Lenny and the New York Philharmonic went on NBC and performed the “Resurrection” Symphony.
Talleyrand said, “Unless you lived before the Revolution, you will never know the sweetness of living.”
I know what he means, don’t you?
This concert is truly a gift “to the community of Santa Barbara in recognition of our unified response to disaster.”
Tickets for adults are a mere $10, and those ages 7-17 will be admitted free. You can buy tickets at the gate, or by calling 805-969-8787.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.