Thursday’s BSO subscription concert embraced the neat idea of celebrating the 125^th anniversary of the Hall by programming pieces composed around 1900. The spirit of new-again music and fresh construction abided as we ambled through the redesigned foyer with its brand new color scheme. But how would we cross the unbridgeable gap between ourselves and the audiences of those Belle Époque premieres?  We read that Debussy’s Nocturnes had been pleasing audiences since the first performance, while initial reception of Mahler’s Fourth had been quite polarizing. We can’t even remotely get into the heads of those hard-to-please listeners, but a temptation to relate appeals and impacts our own perception, of which more later.  

​​Debussy’s soundscape started with the comfortable imagery of Nuages. As the briskly progressing clouds floated by, the melancholic long line of Robert Sheena’s English horn emerged as if a voice of the spectator, in this case our time-travelling self, staring at French skies at dusk and wondering why a composer in the land of Edouard Manet would have associated his shades of gray specifically with those of James McNeill Whistler. Then those clouds dissipated into the soft darkness of a remarkably delicate pianissimo of the cellos.

The mood changed completely as bright violins brought up the excitement of an anticipating crowd in the Fêtes, before Andris Nelsons dramatically set the stage for the arrival of the reveling procession.  It emerged in the distance with muted trumpets, powerfully expressive despite the pianissimo dynamic range, and slowly gained power as the procession moved palpably closer.  Maybe it was just an addiction to the sound of BSO trumpets speaking, but my time-travelling self at this point rejected the notion of Debussy depicting some Parisian merrymaking. These sounds came closer to the unbridled bright palette of Nicolas Poussin’s Dionysian ecstasies.  

For the third Nocturne, the Sirènes, embodied by sopranos and mezzos of the Lorelei ensemble, stood behind the violin section, and for a good reason. Their perfectly controlled wordless song, episodically echoed by the winds, established the main mood of the piece: harmonious layering of the voices and the violins. Debussy had paid special attention to finding the right balance, to the point of specifying which violin chairs should apply mutes, and he would have been pleased. There was one last appearance of the English horn, a farewell nod of the spectator who just witnessed the premiere of a masterpiece.

After the intermission, it was time to try to get into the shoes of those poor blokes of 1902 Berlin and Vienna, who had not yet gotten a memo about Mahler’s rank among symphonists in that era, and had therefore booed at the premier of the Fourth. There had been, to be fair, some glimmers of hope. Mengelberg’s Amsterdam performance had succeded, and one can find a possible hint to what drove it in his 1939 recording. Whereas other audiences had struggled with complexities of the development section, Mengelberg had manipulated the tempi to the point of giving every thematic line its own rhythm and breathing space.

Nelsons chose a different approach. He conducted the first movement as if it were a classical symphony, in full accordance with Mahler’s official claims, but free of the sort of Mahlerian excesses that Mengelberg had used so effectively to make each line in the development sound independent and captivating. For modern ears, better tuned to thematic complexity and less in need of pampering, it worked very well, with distinct voices and easy-to-follow themes .

Concertmaster Nathan Cole shone in the Scherzo, both with the nasal tone of his ‘devil’s’ scordatura violin, foretelling and prefiguring Histoire du Soldat and whatever other devilishness the new century might unfold.  Then came the sheer guilty pleasure of the slow movement. It carefully built up from the cellos and double bases, spreading over the lower register and engaging the rest of the mighty orchestra.  By the time the theme reached the first violins, it seemed to have induced a trance-like state in the hall. With soprano Nikola Hillebrand already on stage for her BSO debut, ours was to wait for her glowing moment. 

That movement had been for Mahler the focal point of the fourth, a pure example of causa finalis. When composing this symphony, Mahler had abandoned explicit articulation of the program behind the music. But the unstoppable sleigh-bells ride through the first movement, and its arrival to the final song, left no doubts about the composer’s desire to channel a rural child’s wonder. A true essence of the Bavarian backcountry that Mahler had strived to embody in these sounds rested on a potent 50-50 mix of piety and healthy appetite. And the best delivery would rely on a childish style of singing.

Even after all the hissing in the troublesome Munich premiere of 1901, the ‘childlike freshness’ of the soprano Margarete Michalek apparently saved the day. Without such casting, cohesion of the narrative would falter. To a 21^st-century listener, all this nonsense about joyfully slaughtered lamb and ox, and fish begging to be cooked in the kitchen of heavens link straight to Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the end of the Universe, with animals gently and eloquently advertising parts of their bodies to diners.

The soft power and beguiling lyricism of Nikola Hillebrand’s voice proceeded not so much in a narrative-un-friendly direction, but rather brought forth other rewards. While the gastronomical text made less sense, by the last strophe of the song we moved an inch closer to believing in its claim, that “…there is no music like this (elsewhere) on Earth.”

Victor Khatutsky has written for the Intelligencer since 2014. He also interests himself in genomics and the poetry of Boris Pasternak.