What: LPO performs Mahler’s 9th
When: May 19th at 8pm
Where: Mahalia Jackson Theater
How much: Tickets start at $20, but student discount tickets available for $10.
This Saturday, May 19, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and the Symphony Chorus of New Orleans will perform Gustav Mahler’s last complete symphony work. This is a one-night only performance, so make sure to clear your schedules lest you miss this stunning work.
You can buy tickets here or at the theater. For students, bring your student ID and you can get in for a measly $10 a person.
Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austrian composer and conductor hailing from Bohemia. His ninth symphony is worth a listen not only because it is lovely, but because it pushes the symphonic form that had been in vogue for centuries to its extremes. Each of its four movements average twenty minutes long (plan bathroom breaks accordingly), and the piece as a whole presages the twentieth century’s fascination with atonality. The piece, while being lyrical and hummable throughout, meanders through different keys, beginning in D major and ending in D-flat major. For the music geeks among our readership, that’s really something. For the rest of you, what that means is, at most, Mahler shirks a somewhat fundamental aspect of the symphonic form and refuses to give listeners a sense of home, return, or true resolution.
Gustav Mahler, 1907
In case my endorsement is not sufficient, the composer Alban Berg wrote of Mahler’s Ninth:
”The first movement is the greatest Mahler ever composed. It is the expression of a tremendous love for this earth, the longing to live on it peacefully and to enjoy nature to its deepest depths – before death comes. For death is inevitable. This whole movement is dominated by the presentiment of death, which makes itself known again and again over the movement’s course. It is the culmination of everything on earth and in dreams, with ever more intense eruptions following the most gentle passages, and of course this intensity is strongest in the horrible moment where death becomes a certainty, where, in the middle of the deepest, most poignant longing for life, death makes itself known ‘with the greatest violence.’ Against that, there is no resistance.”
And that is only one fourth of what LPO will be playing.
Mahler did not live to hear his Ninth Symphony performed, but you can, this weekend. Lucky you. If you are not planning on going, think about how difficult it is to write a symphony and then think about never getting to hear it and guilt yourself into going. You owe Mahler that much. Think about it.
Last but not least, I know some people are a little squeamish about going to classical concerts because there are so many rules and those rules are somewhat obscure. Well, here’s a little story that will help you through the worst of it, assuming you heed its moral:
