Storm clouds churning above Tanglewood held off Friday night as a newly lean (very lean!) Andris Nelsons conducted the BSO in a surprising and stunningly effective program of Bach, Mahler and Mendelssohn at the Koussevitzky Shed.
By extracting Bach’s Air from the Ouverture (Orchestral Suite) No. 3 in D Major, BWV 1068 (known in transcription as Air on a G String) and featuring it as a stand-alone piece outside of its usual context, Nelsons grabbed the opportunity to showcase both his and the BSO’s skill in the infinite nuances of soft, slow, molto cantabile expressiveness and natural breathing dynamics. Under Nelsons’ careful phrasing, a ravishing outflow of the purest desire rose up from the seamless string orchestra, rising, hymn-like, beyond invisible stars, up to heaven. By pausing for breath between phrases and emphasizing how desire swells and retreats, grows ardent and then wanes before welling up again, Nelsons and the BSO, prepared in perfect unity by Concertmaster Nathan Cole, conveyed all of humanity’s irrepressible aspirations to ideality: Truth, Love, God, call it what you will. Soaring above the real to ascend to the impossible, yet solidly grounded by the basses, Bach’s Air confronted us with the epic fullness and torment of our longing for a happiness that we cannot give ourselves.
Gustave Mahler, secular coenobite that he was, deeply admired Bach and aspired to the same piercingly pure love that lifts us above all that is mutable and subject to entropy. Following his wife Alma’s betrayal (her love affair with Gropius) and an interview with Freud, Mahler poured out his grief in the Adagio movement of his unfinished Tenth Symphony. Andris Nelsons was determined to make us hear Mahler’s journey with new depth. Sculpting each phrase carefully for maximum impact and wielding dynamics to create vertiginous collapses, Nelsons forced us, beyond Mahler’s surface story, to experience the serpentine undercurrents and eddies of our own innermost desire as it seeks to find a place of rest in a wilderness of unstable love-objects. From the start, the violas emphasized the eerie, unfamiliar landscape where hope, despair, trust, loss, swirl against one another and repeat their mistakes foolishly without reaching closure. In our desire for relief, we stumble from illusion to illusion — from one unreliable cathexis to the next, crossed by grimacing countercurrents that take away whatever oasis of comfort we might have fooled ourselves in believing that we have found. Mocking horns enforced our anguish; lovely tone painting of happiness evaporated like mirages. Nelsons and the BSO players forced us back into the search until the last idyll, as fragile as the first, prompted a cry of anguish and a noble, if utterly involuntary, existential embrace of pure desire as insatiable. Is this resignation, Nelsons asked, or is it the wound that opens us to a higher, infinite aspiration, such as Bach boldly affirmed?
No one had more to say about personal yearning than Felix Mendelssohn and no one had a deeper trust in the goodness and health of it than he did, having tasted perfect bliss as a child prodigy, gifted for happiness beyond his years. In his E Minor Concerto, violinist María Dueñas’s fresh interpretation of the opening aria gave it an intimate, personal feel in its outpouring of yearning, more joyful than anguished ― or, rather, anguished only because the desire for joy is the most scandalous and impossible desire of all. The orchestra responded confrontationally, with abrupt, short utterances. Her delicate expressivity grew firm, even obstinate, without losing its distinctive, innig savor. Nelsons chose to emphasize strong rhythm rather than rely solely on dynamics to create a dramatic dialogue between Dueňas and the orchestra, culminating in a sort of impasse that served as a clearing for the famous cadenza. Frail and heroically alone facing us and the orchestra, Dueñas was spectacular, with technique miraculous, beyond words. More importantly, she imbued her cry of distress and affirmation with a deep sadness but also an uncompromising belief in the supreme value of joy: Freude! Now at least half-convinced, the orchestra reprised her haunting opening aria with growing zest and enthusiasm, but without relinquishing a deep sense of doubt from the bassoon, bleeding its note of pessimism into the second movement Andante.
Dueñas now delivered a poignantly sweet cantabile theme, tinged with resignation. Maybe there is no place for perfect joy in the face of fate? Maybe there is no absolute Beauty to quench our desire? To me, this high point of her journey revealed the intensity of her musicianship over and beyond her stunning technique. This passage required subtlety and lyricism through self-restraint. She revealed hidden depths of beauty, coloration, and marvelous soulfulness. The orchestra confirmed her willingness to doubt as a commendable turn to maturity, seeking to comfort her but also emphasizing fatalism as her violin fought valiantly to rise upwards, blossoming into a gentle cry of perfectly pure desire. The impact on the orchestra of Dueñas’s celestial high soaring was unexpected. As though moved by its sincerity and sheer purity, the orchestra turned from its mature fatalism to embrace the soloist’s call to pursue joy.
Through Action! Dueñas led the orchestra in the Allegretto finale into fighting actively for happiness. Now Allegro molto vivace, violin and orchestra worked synergistically to shape life into the form of our desire and to turn Fate into Destiny through resolve and creative power. Felix had met Goethe when he was twelve years old and possessed a deep grasp of the lessons of Faust: Im Anfang war die Tat!– In the beginning was the Action!
Called back for four curtain calls, Dueñas again wowed us with her expressive abilities, giving us a heart-breakingly exquisite rendition of Franz von Vecsey’s Valse Triste.
The same theme is treated in Goethe’s two poems, Calm Sea and Prosperous Journey, set as a diptych. Beethoven cast Goethe’s poems in a choral setting. Perhaps urged by his friend David Marx, Felix took “tone painting” a step further by eschewing the words altogether and relying solely on the music to convey the immense temptation of the calm sea and the need for wind and waves to set life into motion. We find happiness when we brave obstacles for it, take risks, face challenges, feel ourselves exert our creative resources to shape life and turn fate into destiny.
Leon Golub is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and has been a lover of classical music for over 50 years.