Mahler’s many voices: how the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has formed and been formed by his music
A palpable buzz crammed Orchestra Corridor on the afternoon of 9 Might because the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Jaap van Zweden, launched into Mahler’s formidable Sixth Symphony. The Friday matinee had drawn a full home, and the efficiency that unfolded was a gripping examine of management, energy and readability. When the ultimate motion’s notorious hammer blows fell, they did so with unflinching and devastating precision. The efficiency neither overstated Mahler’s deep ironies nor softened his stark imaginative and prescient.
This live performance carried added weight: it marked the CSO’s ultimate efficiency earlier than their European tour, which included showcasing the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies on the prestigious 2025 Amsterdam Mahler Pageant.
Held solely thrice in its century-long historical past, the Amsterdam pageant stays a touchstone for any orchestra severely engaged with Mahler. The town’s connection to the composer is profound. By way of the efforts of Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam grew to become a second residence of types for Mahler and for his music. An invite to carry out there’s a distinction few ensembles obtain. For the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the primary North American orchestra to carry out on the pageant, it represented each recognition and problem. And it’s providing CSO followers a chance to ask not solely what the CSO has turn out to be as a Mahler orchestra, however how it obtained there.
Not like some ensembles which have outlined their Mahler id by way of a single determine – Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic, for instance – the CSO’s Mahler custom is extra diffuse, formed over generations by a wide range of conductors and music administrators. It might clarify why the CSO has over time approached Mahler with flexibility – one of many orchestra’s nice strengths. It has enabled the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to talk Mahler’s huge, multivalent language with fluency and nuance.
The CSO’s Mahler lineage stretches again over a century. Frederick Inventory, the orchestra’s second music director, carried out the U.S. premiere of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony on 15 April 1921, only a yr after he heard it in Amsterdam. Although he minimize eleven minutes from the rating, the efficiency – the one U.S. premiere of a Mahler symphony to be achieved by the CSO – was enthusiastically acquired by the native press. The Chicago Night Publish praised the ensemble’s functionality, writing that ‘there was nothing Mahler might write which they may not play’. Inventory’s daring selection was an early signal of great engagement with a composer nonetheless on the margins of the repertory.
The custom deepened below Fritz Reiner, whose recording of the Fourth Symphony stays a mannequin of taut, clear Mahler interpretation. Somewhat than lean into the composer’s expressive extremes, he sensitively shows a ‘cool’ objectivity compared to Leonard Bernstein’s extra emotional model. Reiner revealed Mahler’s imaginative and prescient by way of precision, orchestral readability and tightly managed climaxes, qualities that endure throughout the CSO’s musical DNA right now.
Sir Georg Solti introduced a special form of vitality to Gustav Mahler’s music. Throughout his tenure, the CSO returned the symphonies to their lively repertoire and recorded an entire cycle. Solti’s recording of the Eighth Symphony, made throughout the orchestra’s first European tour, captured a mix of scale, hearth and polish that grew to become synonymous with how the orchestra performed Mahler below his baton. This potent mixture of the conductor’s high-energy interpretation and the orchestra’s formidable technical talent created a Mahler sound that was distinctive, by demonstrating how energy and precision might overshadow emotional exploration.
But even throughout the Solti years, the CSO confirmed its Mahler finesse with different interpretations. Carlo Maria Giulini, principal visitor conductor throughout Solti’s tenure, provided a luminous studying of the Symphony No.1 in 1971 that was the other of Solti’s. The Chicago Day by day Information critic on the time commented that his interpretation ‘was of a stature, an integrity, an electrifying grandeur that relegated even these landmark performances to the shadows. It appeared to take all of the virtues of each interpretation, heard or merely conceived, and fuse them in a brand new, flawlessly projected and proportioned unity’. Giulini and the CSO would go on to document the symphony for Angel and later win a Grammy. Even right now, it stays a benchmark recording.
The orchestra demonstrated exceptional adaptability and sustained excellence below subsequent conductors. Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez every introduced distinct interpretive views – heat, refined, analytical – whereas nonetheless leveraging the ensemble’s inherent strengths. This skill to take care of the best technical requirements whereas accommodating various inventive visions speaks volumes concerning the resilience of the CSO’s institutional mastery of this demanding repertoire. The ensemble might embrace divergent views with out ever dropping its heart: tonally highly effective, versatile and responsive.
This was evident throughout the 2024–25 season, which featured three Mahler symphonies carried out by artists providing sharply contrasting viewpoints. Klaus Mäkelä, the CSO’s music director designate, led a sprawling account of the Third Symphony marked by readability and restraint. Eschewing melodrama, he delivered a cautious studying. The opening motion was notable for its refined textures and distinctive solo work by trombonist Tim Higgins. The fourth motion, with mezzo-soprano Wiebke Lehmkuhl, was tenderly formed, and the finale glowed with muted radiance. If the efficiency lacked a sweeping emotional arc, it made up for it in musical integrity and interpretive freshness.
In distinction, van Zweden introduced a extra direct, propulsive vitality to Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Avoiding indulgence within the work’s phantasmagorical episodes, he propelled the music ahead with relentless momentum. This no-nonsense method gave the work a shocking cohesion – its infamous eccentricities harnessed to a bigger function.
But it surely was the Sixth Symphony that stood out because the CSO’s most compelling Mahler assertion of the season. The orchestra responded to van Zweden’s exacting management with beautiful focus. The primary motion balanced gravity with kinetic vitality, and the Scherzo bristled with menace, delivered with clear articulation from the low strings and percussion. The Andante unfolded with tender lyricism, its emotional depth rendered with out sentimentality. And within the Finale, van Zweden achieved one thing uncommon: a way of nihilism that made the hammer blows really feel devastating but built-in. The shocks have been brutal – however earned, not imposed.
For van Zweden, the pairing of the Sixth and Seventh was a press release of intent. He described them as opposites that belong collectively to Kyle MacMillan in a publish for CSO.org, framing the 2 symphonies as a journey from despair to affirmation. And it’s exactly that pair that the CSO took to Amsterdam. There, at one of the crucial storied Mahler festivals on this planet, they joined an elite circle of ensembles which have formed how we hear this composer.
Although van Zweden holds no formal title with the CSO, his Mahler collaborations with the orchestra have been frequent and fruitful. His rapport with the musicians is unmistakable – constructed on shared values of readability, steadiness and formal rigor. His interpretations could not search the theatrical however, of their sharp contours and interior conviction, they honor Mahler’s voice in one other method: by trusting the rating and trusting the orchestra.
The CSO’s Mahler custom – over a century within the making – will not be certain by efficiency dogma. That could be the purpose. What emerges as an alternative is an interpretive ecology: various, evolving, rooted in excellence. What unites all of it is the orchestra itself and the sound cultivated for the reason that time of Reiner and Solti. In 2025, each at residence and on the world stage, the CSO reaffirmed its place not solely in Mahler’s historical past however in his residing current.
Zach Carstensen
