|
Back
Mahler Before Mahler: Rafael Payare Opens the OSM Season Montreal
Maison Symphonique, Place des Arts
09/16/2026 - & September 17*, 2026
Gustav Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: “Rheinlegendchen”, “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen”, “Das irdische Leben”, “Urlicht”, “Revelge” & “Der Tamboursg’sell” – Das klagende Lied
Miah Persson (soprano), Rose Naggar-Tremblay (contralto), Clay Hilley (tenor), Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Chœur de l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Andrew Megill (chorus master), Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Rafael Payare (conductor)
(© Marie Staggat)
There are composers whose juvenilia one admires out of historical curiosity, and then there is Mahler. Das klagende Lied, begun when its composer was barely twenty, is not so much an apprentice work as an artistic premonition: a gigantic, occasionally unruly canvas in which the future First, Second and Third Symphonies can already be glimpsed in embryo. Wagnerian catastrophe, German Romantic folklore, grotesque humour, funeral music, fanfares, supernatural revelation and orchestral extravagance are all present, if not yet entirely domesticated.
The OSM’s opening concert of its 93rd season therefore offered something considerably more interesting than a rarity. Rafael Payare coupled Das klagende Lied with six songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, creating an unusually revealing diptych: the intimate, ironic and folk‑inflected Mahler of the songs followed by the young composer attempting to turn a Grimmian nightmare into an immense music drama. The programme was Mahler before Mahler had quite become Mahler. The plot of Das klagende Lied could scarcely be darker. Two brothers compete for a queen; the successful younger brother is murdered by the jealous elder, who claims the prize for himself. The crime eventually returns from the grave when a flute fashioned from the victim’s bone reveals the truth during the wedding celebrations. The three sections, “Waldmärchen”, “Der Spielmann” and “Hochzeitsstück”, move from enchanted forest to murder, from accusation to grotesque festivity, and finally to apocalyptic collapse. It is an extraordinarily Mahlerian story for a composer of twenty. Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the score is precisely the fact that Mahler has not yet learned the mature art of concealment. He says everything. An abyss produces orchestral depths; festivities summon brass fanfares; every reversal of fortune seems to provoke another “O Leide! Weh!” There is something almost disarmingly literal about it. But beneath that youthful overstatement lies an imagination of astonishing scope.
The Wunderhorn songs provided an ideal prelude. Here Mahler is already the master of the miniature: a few minutes suffice to conjure a soldier’s death, a lover’s farewell, a child’s hunger, a supernatural vision or the melancholy of a drummer boy facing execution. The apparent simplicity is deceptive. These are miniature dramas in which the folk‑like and the metaphysical coexist with remarkable economy. Matthias Goerne opened the evening with these songs, and his performance was more rewarding than some of the more severe assessments of his current vocal condition might suggest. There has undeniably been a diminution of the former vocal brio. The voice no longer possesses quite the same bloom or effortless expansiveness, and the upper register can sound more constricted than it once did. But Goerne’s principal asset here was not vocal splendour. It was language. He remains an exceptional interpreter of German text, with an instinct for verbal inflection that can make a song seem almost spoken from within rather than sung from without. His physical involvement was considerable – at times almost operatically so – but it was never merely decorative. Every gesture seemed to arise from his attempt to inhabit the word and its psychological implication. For Mahler, that matters enormously. These songs are not miniature Italian arias. Their dramatic substance resides in the relationship between word, gesture and musical irony. Goerne’s reading therefore possessed an authority that cannot be measured simply in decibels or vocal freshness. Indeed, the most outstanding thing about his contribution was his handling of the text.
This distinction became even more pertinent in Das klagende Lied. The work is sometimes treated as a sort of proto‑symphonic extravaganza, but its dramatic core is vocal and verbal. It is not an Italian aria recital with an unusually large orchestra. The singers are narrators, witnesses, victims and accusers, and Mahler’s enormous orchestra is the psychological world through which they move. Payare clearly relished that world. His Mahler is intensely physical: arms, torso, shoulders and even feet seem enlisted in the effort to contain the score, and Das klagende Lied gave him an orchestra sufficiently large to justify the expenditure of anatomical resources. Four harps, two tubas, the enormous orchestral forces and the additional ensemble placed in the pit produced the kind of late‑Romantic opulence in which Mahler’s imagination could luxuriate. The OSM responded with playing of considerable authority and, often, ravishing colour.
The spatial deployment of the distant brass was particularly effective. The sound seemed to emanate from another plane of existence, turning the final wedding scene into something simultaneously festive and sinister. It was an inspired use of the Maison Symphonique’s architecture. Yet Payare’s interpretation was not beyond criticism. He sometimes seemed determined to make the young Mahler sound more mature than he actually was. The score contains tectonic fractures, primitive violence and abrupt collisions between blocks of sound. Payare occasionally preferred a cultivated symphonic transition where the music would have benefited from greater brutality. Mahler at twenty should not always sound like Mahler at fifty. There were moments when the orchestral polish became almost too civilised for the music. One wanted the conductor to let the young composer’s violence remain violent, rather than smoothing its edges into the grandeur of the mature Mahler. Yet the larger dramatic conception remained persuasive, and the OSM’s playing was frequently superb.
The vocal centre of gravity belonged to Rose Naggar-Tremblay and Clay Hilley. Naggar‑Tremblay possesses one of those voices whose aristocratic quality is apparent almost before the singer has begun to phrase. Her contralto has darkness without coarseness, authority without heaviness and an unusually attractive grain. She was occasionally submerged by the enormous orchestration, particularly alongside Hilley, but when Mahler reduced the texture her voice emerged with striking individuality. Her German diction is still developing its full naturalness, but the musical intelligence is already evident. More importantly, there is a palpable sense that this is a singer whose instrument will become increasingly formidable as her experience in German repertoire deepens. She was one of the evening’s most compelling discoveries.
Clay Hilley, meanwhile, needed no such qualification. He once again demonstrated why he is emerging as one of today’s most impressive dramatic Heldentenors. The voice has exactly the qualities this repertory demands: penetration without shrillness, metallic brilliance without vulgarity, and enough stamina to ride Mahler’s orchestra without turning the performance into a vocal endurance contest. I had previously heard Hilley as Florestan in Fidelio in Toronto, and more recently as Tristan in Barcelona, where he was the strongest element in a production centered around Lise Davidsen’s debut as Isolde. His performance here confirmed the impression made on both occasions. Hilley does not merely possess a large voice; he knows what to do with it.
Miah Persson presented the more equivocal case. Hers was once an exceptionally ravishing instrument, endowed with a freshness and bloom that made her particularly distinguished in lyric repertoire. Much of that beauty remains, but the voice no longer has quite the same spontaneous brio. Nor was Das klagende Lied the ideal environment in which to conceal the change. Mahler asks the soprano to rise repeatedly above an orchestral apparatus that can sound positively Wagnerian in its appetite. Persson sometimes appeared to be concentrating so intensely on producing the necessary brilliance that the words became less sharply etched than they might have been. The issue was not simply volume; it was expression. At her best, Persson allowed the line to breathe and the drama to emerge naturally; elsewhere, the effort to produce vocal radiance seemed to consume some of the interpretive attention. The voice remains attractive, but this was no longer the effortlessly luminous instrument remembered from earlier years.
The OSM Chorus, under Andrew Megill, contributed with commendable discipline. Mahler’s choral writing is treacherous: the sopranos are repeatedly exposed in punishing registers, while the ensemble must alternate between folk‑like celebration, supernatural proclamation and sheer terror. The chorus negotiated these demands impressively, particularly in the final movement.
And ultimately the evening belonged to the work itself. Das klagende Lied is not a neglected masterpiece in the sense that every bar equals the mature Mahler. It does not. It can be blunt, extravagant, over‑insistent and occasionally almost adolescent in its rhetoric, but this work’s very imperfections reveal the extraordinary speed with which Mahler’s imagination was developing. One hears the Ring, Bruckner, German folklore and the Viennese tradition, but one also hears the unmistakable Mahler who would soon absorb all of them and render them strange.
The final irony is that Das klagende Lied is itself about the return of the repressed: a murdered voice comes back, through a bone flute, to expose a crime that power has tried to bury. Mahler’s own artistic voice operates rather similarly. The mature symphonies may have become more sophisticated, but the essential obsessions are already here: death interrupting celebration, nature becoming uncanny, the grotesque invading the sublime, and the past refusing to remain silent. Payare and the OSM did not entirely resist the temptation to upholster this young Mahler in the velvet of his mature orchestral language. But the performance nevertheless brought the work vividly to life, helped by a distinguished Hilley, a deeply promising Naggar‑Tremblay, an increasingly complex Persson and, above all, a Goerne whose vocal limitations were more than compensated by his command of the word.
For once, Mahler’s youth did not need to be excused; it needed to be heard.
Ossama el Naggar
|
