Steven Winn, arts journalist and critic, will be co-moderating our live events in San Francisco. In this post, he explores the nature of this under-taking and summarizes the American Orchestra Forum’s ultimate goal. “It’s not settled answers we’re after, but questions, even unsettling ones, that lead to more inquiry, conversation and curiosity. And then lead us back, when the talking ends, to the music.”
Any performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is a major communal undertaking. Ninety-five minutes of music (with no intermission), ranging from the raucous to the sublime, that requires a massive orchestral ensemble, a women’s chorus, a girl’s chorus and a vocal soloist. Not to mention an audience willing and ready to come along for the long and twisting ride. It may take a village to raise a child, but you need good-sized city to pull off Mahler’s Third and make it work.
I happened to sit a whole closer to the stage than I normally do on Sept. 21, when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony’s first Mahler 3 in nine years. From my fifth row orchestra seat the marvel of all those musicians (and listeners) pulling together seemed more marvelous – and unlikely – than ever. Things that meld, aurally and visually from a distance, are riskier, more combustive and febrile up close.
The cellos hammering out an abruptly angry phrase over the other strings’ placid murmurs. The offstage snare drum and trumpet sounding very distant indeed, forlorn and intrepid. The first violins striking up a whispered conversation, clear across the stage, with the seconds. The piccolo piping up and quickly dying back in the woody throng.
My nearby seatmates, too, seemed caught up in contrary forces. One couple was bonding tenderly one moment and lost in moody isolation from each the next. An older listener to one side of me remained motionless, apparently transfixed or hypnotized, even when his glasses clattered to the floor during mezzo Katrina Karneus’ grave warning to Take heed, humanity! (“O Mensch! Gib Acht!”). The young SF Conservatory student on my other side hummed along – merrily, unconsciously – through the cascading marches of the first movement. “You’re humming,” his partner whispered. He stopped for a while and started up again. He couldn’t help it. I wondered if MTT would hear him – or if he’d mind.
Music unites us and creates community not by some magical and frictionless harmony of the spheres. It does it with a mighty grinding of gears that don’t naturally or easily mesh. It’s hard won, and more worthy, more precious because of it. It’s what we all bring as singular, very different, even divisive individuals that makes music matter and draws us together into its singular enchantment.
The American Orchestra Forum, with its rotating cast of musicans and scholars, managers and writers, everyday audience members and marquee-name music directors, aspires to its own kind of synthesis of disparate voices, ideas and aspirations. Like all good conversations, we hope these will thrive on freshness as well as experience, wit as well as wisdom, dissonance as well as concord.
It’s not settled answers we’re after, but questions, even unsettling ones, that lead to more inquiry, conversation and curiosity. And then lead us back, when the talking ends, to the music – as an audience of many tastes and temperaments, dreams and doubts, defining personalities and resolute quirks, who somehow manage to come together, at least for a while in the concert hall, as one.