Mahler

 

Jaime Martin conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

 and choirs through Mahler's Third Symphony this week.

The night is young and the concert hall is hung in tuning sounds, dress circles and a hundred points of light. Mobiles switched off, the audience adopt immobile postures in readiness. The largest orchestra, assembled in array like a cityscape, somewhere like curlicued Vienna, begins to speak that city’s multifarious languages of old, all in good time. Though what are these towering forest sounds, shifting in unison or harmony or disruption, to do with this capital cityscape in sight of the ancient frontiers? Disquiet might be querulous, absence might be abyss, thunder might be transitory, the dress circle is in two minds. We could step onto that steam train in our minds, surging through alps, descrying passing waterfalls outside its blue windows, racing with absolute glee towards the modern world. We could be on a high for days, and then what? Nature very rightly surges from the earth and the flocks that wheel around its topmost expressions make song as faint as twenty violins. A clang or toot directs thoughts into day just past, inconsistencies of computer behaviour, hopeless headlines, something someone said lingering, liltingly. Or recent months, mind of insistent realities, bushfire sunsets, homeless walking the streets in need of home. Everyone is turning to tune in, shifting from one immobile style to another more comfortable, while an orchestra is a picture of concentration, concatenations his, consternations his. Discordance might be declamation, crescendo be craziness, rupture might be premonition, the stalls are all ears. But where are the archdukes of yesteryear? A forest of cellos send calling cards, steam trains of percussion talk up the procession process, a skyline of horns resound the present moment. Subscribers rest into their good fortune as the inscribed movement “comfortable without haste” merges into the movement “very slowly, mysteriously”, human voices singing now of the day that could only be summer in its intensity glory. And yet, as before now, the closing sixth opens the way through. Disjunction flows into connection, presence is indescribable presence, whispers wander into wonder, everyone is listening, everyone is close in, everyone is hearing the resolutions, everyone is in the space. The conductor signals closure and bends to silence. Ovations join in the unstrained uplift, sounds of thanks mingling with relief and tradition. And so, stalls and dress circle escalator up, walk out into the star hung night of city windows and flowing river crowd. Talk of Mahler’s intended seventh movement on heaven, never included after the glorious sixth. It would have been an anticlimax, we agree, and oh heaven is not to be an anticlimax. There is lychee ice cream and a cooling breeze as we cross the bridge on a high that will continue for days.