Dallas Symphony Orchestra opens Bravo! Vail residency with thrilling performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5

Gustav Mahler believed the symphony “must contain everything.”

In the composer’s Fifth Symphony, the tripartite structure presents and holds together a musical picture of the human subconscious at a crisis. Mahler’s abstract approach mixes abrupt outbursts with mournful passages — without warning — as clashing sounds wrestle with the necessary conclusion posited by the composer’s auditory allusions to the Nietzschean perspective: meaning must be derived from within.

On Wednesday, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra captured all of Mahler’s dramatic philosophical overtones with a magnificent Bravo! Vail residency opener. From the unaccompanied trumpet solo to the pensive Adagietto movement, conductor Fabio Luisi painted from a musical palate of colorful expressions — with shocking orchestral dissonances giving way to hopeful horns — to present a summation of Mahler’s search for purpose through death, life and love.

The evening opened with Daniil Trifonov’s performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9. The Russian, whom The Times of London hailed as “without question the most astounding pianist of our age,” showed why he is one of the world’s leading classical virtuosos during the three-movement work.

He transformed the Andantino from a contemplative lull between two spritely movements into a powerful expression of exquisite control. Even with eight keys simultaneously pressed, the 33-year-old elegantly isolated the most important pitch in every chord cluster, pulling out those notes most critical in pushing the phrase forward.

Support Local Journalism

Donate

Perhaps the only hiccup came from I-70, as an ill-timed semi-truck’s brakes forced Trifonov to postpone the start of the final movement by a few seconds. Once it got going, however, the joyous Rondo became a playground for the Grammy Award winner to frolic up and down the keys as Luisi’s orchestra matched the soloists playfulness with every response.

After intermission, Stuart Stephenson sliced through the silence with his triple-tonguing Funeral March fanfare. The Juilliard alumnus’ sharp accents and full-bodied sixteenth notes gave the signature trumpet excerpt a uniquely stoic personality. When the full brass section entered to support the trumpeter’s brilliant tone, one couldn’t help but wonder if the 72-minute symphony’s grandest moment was right here in the first 20 seconds.

In true Mahler fashion, however, the listener was swept away to another scene. After an initial fury subsided early in the second movement, the cellos’ heart-breaking lament hearkened back to the trios heard earlier. After multiple peaks and valleys, the fortissimo brass chorale in D major foreshadowed Mahler’s eventual climactic resolution coming in the final movement.

Often relegated to dutiful rest-counting in the symphonic setting, this was a night for the brass to shine. The power of Barry Hearn and Matthew Good’s low-brass sections overwhelmed the nearly-full Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater audience with a velvety sizzle still reverberating off of the mountainside Thursday morning.

While Stephenson signaled his opening motif multiple times throughout the night, it was his smooth slurs in the Scherzo — a standalone third movement — that may have been the most under appreciated brass solo of the evening. His control and precision in softly sliding into the upper register demonstrated how Mahler’s work tests all aspects of the instrument.

If Stephenson’s role was to signal back to ominous reflections of mortality presented in the Funeral March, principal French Horn Daniel Hawkins’ job was to herald hopeful, triumphant themes. He tilted his bell to the venue’s acoustic sound boards during his own Scherzo solo, the rich sound echoing out to the patio seats.

In the Adagietto, arguably Mahler’s most famous movement of all, the brass finally received a break. The arrangement for string and harp allowed harpist Emily Levin to provide what can only be described as a perfect soundtrack for a bride and groom’s “first look.” Mahler evidently wrote the piece to represent the love he had for his soon-to-be wife, Alma. Even so, the undergirding conflict of his opposing ideas — fear of death and desperate desire for truth in life — meant Levin’s lyrical sections were sandwiched by symphonic crashes amidst a sea of radical uncertainty.

The harpists’ graceful plucking wasn’t a straight-forward proclamation that love wins. Rather, it sounded more like a reminder that, no matter how tragic and painful life can be, love is an underlying flame capable of burning — even amidst the storm.

Ultimately, Mahler’s divergent mood swings — from anxiousness to sadness, turmoil and nastiness to peace and love — pointed the listener toward his ultimate thesis: hope of redemption. He said in 1911 that the Fifth Symphony came to represent “the sum of all the suffering I have been compelled to endure at the hands of life.”

As Luisi brought the music to its heroic end in a new tonality, D major, the audience roared in approval of the resolution. Their standing ovation seemed to be an unspoken acknowledgement that Bruno Walter — Mahler’s assistant — was right when he characterized the work as one of “strength and sound self-reliance … and its basic mood one of optimism.”