Composer Gustav Mahler, whose music is enjoying new popularity, is celebrated at Amsterdam festival
Facing him was 'MAHLER' etched in gold on a cartouche and shining in a spotlight, centered in a permanent position of honor among the 17 composers enshrined across the balcony front. And sitting in the first row directly behind the sign Friday night was Marina Mahler, the composer's 81-year-old granddaughter.
'It was just as it should be. I was terribly moved and excited at the same time,' she said after the final note of Symphony No. 1. 'It affected me in the deepest possible way.'
All 10 of Mahler's numbered symphonies are being presented in order along with his other major works from May 8-18, ending on the 114th anniversary of his death at age 50.
'This is in a way the first orchestra that really trusted in Mahler,' Mäkela said.
Joining the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra are the Budapest Festival Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic, with conducting split among Mäkelä (Symphonies 1 and 8), Iván Fischer (2 and 5), Fabio Luisi (3 and 4), Jaap van Zweden (6 and 7), Kirill Petrenko (9) and Sakari Oramo (10). Programs are simulcast to a 1,500-seat amphitheater in Amsterdam's Vondelpark.
'We have a U.S. orchestra for the first time in this festival,' said Simon Reinink, who headed the planning as general director of The Concertgebouw (the building, as opposed to the orchestra). 'We also thought why shouldn't we invite an Asian orchestra?'
Early champion was in Amsterdam
Mahler's first champion was Willem Mengelberg, who conducted the entirety of the first Mahler Festival in 1920 to celebrate his 25th anniversary as the Concertgebouw's chief conductor. A second festival was held in 1995 to mark the 75th anniversary of the first festival and a 100th anniversary celebration was planned for 2020 and canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
'Mahler is really in the DNA of the orchestra,' said Dominik Winterling, managing director of Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. 'You feel it because we have a certain tradition, which is also passed on from generation to generation.'
Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein were Mahler's other primary proponents in the 20th century.
'My father, who was a musician, always told me: `Mahler was a great conductor and a good composer with some problems. Usually the form is not perfect and it's formless,'' Iván Fischer said of Sándor Fischer, also a conductor.
When Bernstein led the Vienna Philharmonic in all of Mahler's symphonies over a decade starting in the mid-1960s, there was resistance.
'In intervals, in corridors, everywhere musicians talk to each other, there was this: `Yes, it's good music but a little kitsch. Well, why does he need these bombastic effects?'' Iván Fischer recalled. 'Really the cult of Mahler, where everybody started to love it, came after this cycle of Bernstein in Vienna but it was a spirit of the time. I think what created the breakthrough was that you didn't feel that music had to comport to certain norms and so it was a little liberation of the '60s, the time of free love, Beatles.'
Mahler has gained acceptance. The Fifth Symphony's adagietto was conducted by Bernstein at President John F. Kennedy's funeral and is featured in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film 'Death in Venice' and 2022's 'Tár.' No. 2 sets a mood in a current Tony Award nominee, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray.'
Klaus Mäkelä gets prominent role
Though just 29, Mäkelä was a natural fit to lead off with the first symphony because he becomes both Concertgebouw chief conductor and CSO music director for the 2027-28 season. His exuberantly stepped down two dozen steps toward the podium to open his program with Anders Hillborg's 'Hell Mountain,' a world premiere commissioned for the festival that quotes two of Mahler's works.
Van Zweden, who has a home a short walk from the Concertgebouw, was to open the canceled 2020 festival with the New York Philharmonic, when he was its music director. Van Zweden first heard Mahler When he was 6 or 7, van Zweden heard a fourth symphony led by Bernard Haitink, the Concertgebouw's chief conductor from 1961-88. A violinist in his youth, van Zweden became the orchestra's youngest concertmaster at age 19.
'The scores of Mahler, what he gave us is a GPS system about the road of his life,' he said. 'He is such a human and we are such a witness of all the emotional roller-coasters and beauty and sadness and everything in his life during that performance. That is a different experience than a Tchaikovsky symphony.'
Luisi first heard Mahler when he attended a Fifth Symphony as a 15-year-old in Genoa, Italy.
'It was overwhelming. I didn't know that this music could be so passionate and intense all the time — such a long symphony with a lot of different characters, different feelings, different moods,' he recalled. 'I remember getting out of that concert shaking in pleasure and surprise.'
Mäkelä used a new edition of the score for No. 1 compiled by Michael Waterman, the fifth member of his family to play in the Concertgebouw in a lineage dating to 1950. With the help of his mom Cleora and friend Silvio Scambone, Waterman compiled markings going back to 1967. He now is working on editions of Nos. 5 and 9 based on notations dating to Mengelberg, who headed the orchestra from 1895-1945 before he was banned for his collaboration with Nazis.
On Saturday, Fisher took a five-minute break between the first and second movements of No. 2, specified by Mahler but not often followed. In a hall famous for its precise acoustics, he drew breathtaking playing from horns that scampered on and off stage like NFL special teams.
'So you hear these trumpets from heaven, everywhere, different directions,' he said.
Mäkelä is convinced Mahler has become more accessible in current times.
'It speaks to the audience now because it's music that everyone can relate to,' he said. 'Because it's so personal, it somehow gives you a possibility to self-reflect.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
11 hours ago
- New York Post
D-Day veteran and TikTok star ‘Papa Jake' Larson dead at 102
D-Day veteran ″Papa Jake″ Larson, who survived German gunfire on Normandy's bluffs in 1944 and then garnered 1.2 million followers on TikTok late in life by sharing stories to commemorate World War II and his fallen comrades, has died at 102. An animated speaker who charmed strangers young and old with his quick smile and generous hugs, the self-described country boy from Minnesota was ''cracking jokes til the end,'' his granddaughter wrote in announcing his death. Tributes to him quickly filled his 'Story Time with Papa Jake' TikTok account from across the United States, where he had been living in Lafayette, California. Advertisement 5 D-Day veteran ″Papa Jake″ Larson and TikTok star has died at 102. AP Towns around Normandy, still grateful to Allied forces who helped defeat the occupying Nazis in World War II, paid him homage too. 'Our beloved Papa Jake has passed away on July 17th at 102 years young,' granddaughter McKaela Larson posted on his social media accounts. 'He went peacefully.' 'As Papa would say, love you all the mostest,' she wrote. Advertisement Born Dec. 20, 1922, in Owatonna, Minnesota, Larson enlisted in the National Guard in 1938, lying about his age since he was only 15 at the time. In 1942, he was sent overseas and was stationed in Northern Ireland. He became operations sergeant and assembled the planning books for the invasion of Normandy. Advertisement 5 'Our beloved Papa Jake has passed away on July 17th at 102 years young,' granddaughter McKaela Larson posted on his social media accounts, where he shared humorous anecdotes and somber reminders about the horrors of war. AP He was among the nearly 160,000 Allied troops who stormed the Normandy shore on D-Day, June 6, 1944, surviving machine-gun fire when he landed on Omaha Beach. He made it unhurt to the bluffs that overlook the beach, then studded with German gun emplacements that mowed down American soldiers. 'We are the lucky ones,' Larson told The Associated Press at the 81st anniversary of D-Day in June, speaking amid the immaculate rows of graves at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. Advertisement 'We are their family. We have the responsibility to honor these guys who gave us a chance to be alive.' 5 'We are their family,' Larson, who survived the machine-gun fire when he landed on Omaha Beach, said about fallen D-Day troops. 'We have the responsibility to honor these guys who gave us a chance to be alive.' AP He went on to fight through the Battle of the Bulge, a grueling month-long fight in Belgium and Luxembourg that was one of the defining moments of the war and of Hitler's defeat. His service earned him a Bronze Star and a French Legion of Honor award. In recent years, Larson made repeated trips to Normandy for D-Day commemorations — and at every stop, 'Papa Jake' was greeted by people asking for a selfie. In return, he offered up a big hug, to their greatest joy. One memorable encounter came in 2023, when he came across Bill Gladden, a then-99-year-old British veteran who survived a glider landing on D-Day and a bullet that tore through his ankle. 5 Larson made trips to Normandy for D-Day commemorations, greeted by people asking for a selfie with 'Papa Jake.' AP 'I want to give you a hug, thank you. I got tears in my eyes. We were meant to meet,' Larson told Gladden, as their hands, lined and spotted with age, clasped tightly. Gladden died the following year. In his TikTok posts and interviews, Larson combined humorous anecdotes with somber reminders about the horrors of war. Advertisement Reflecting to AP on the three years he was in Europe, Larson said he is 'no hero.' Speaking in 2024, he also had a message to world leaders: 'Make peace not war.' 5 Larson talks to a girl during a gathering in preparation of the 79th D-Day anniversary in La Fiere, Normandy, France, on June 4, 2023. AP He often called himself 'the luckiest man in the world,' and expressed awe at all the attention he was getting. 'I'm just a country boy. Now I'm a star on TikTok,' he told AP in 2023. 'I'm a legend! I didn't plan this, it came about.' Small-town museums and groups around Normandy that work to honor D-Day's heroes and fallen shared tributes online to Larson, one of their most loyal visitors. Advertisement 'He was an exceptional witness and bearer of memory,' the Overlord Museum posted on Facebook. 'He came every year to the museum, with his smile, his humility and his tales that touched all generations. His stories will continue to live. Rest in peace Papa Jake,' it read. 'Thanks for everything.'
San Francisco Chronicle
16 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjørnsen dies at age 69
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Ingvar Ambjørnsen, a Norwegian author who mixed a sharp, even dark tone with humor and empathy in works that depicted the lives of the oppressed and vulnerable, has died, his publisher said. He was 69. The Cappelen Damm publishing house did not specify the cause of death. Ambjørnsen had long been public with his battle against a lung illness called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Born on May 20, 1956, in Tönsberg — described on his German-language author website as 'Norway's most bar-filled town' — Ambjørnsen grew up in Larvik and worked in various jobs in industry and psychiatry before publishing his first documentary novel in 1981. Four years later, he moved to Hamburg, where he lived for decades. 'His books are characterized by powerful, realistic descriptions of the seamier side of life,' the publisher said. Ambjørnsen became one of the publisher's best-known contemporary authors with four novels built around the character Elling, a shy and imaginative outsider who coped with the funny but endearing foibles of daily life after release from a psychiatric hospital. The comedy 'Elling' — the story of two recently released mental patients bunking together in an apartment in Oslo — was nominated in 2001 for an Academy Award as best foreign-language film. The tale landed on Broadway in 2010, with a play starring Denis O'Hare and Brendan Fraser: One of the misfits was fixated on his mother, the other obsessed with sex. According to the author website, Ambjørnsen wrote 18 novels and three collections of short stories, as well as several books for children and youth. A newly written collection of short stories is set to go on sale in Norway on July 31.
Hamilton Spectator
21 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Memory cafes at the National Comedy Center ignite laughter and connection for dementia patients
JAMESTOWN, N.Y. (AP) — Side by side on a sofa inside the National Comedy Center, Gail and Mario Cirasunda chuckled at a clip from the 1980s sitcom 'Family Ties' that was playing on a TV screen. The show's oldest daughter, Mallory, was introducing her unconventional artist boyfriend Nick to her bewildered television family. 'I think our daughter brought him home once. Maybe two of our daughters!' Gail said with a laugh over coffee and donuts later. 'Five daughters, two sons,' her husband Mario, 85, chimed in. 'Sometimes I'd wonder,' he smiled, shaking his head at the memories of the couple's own family antics over their 59-year marriage. Moments like this are what brought the Cirasundas to the comedy museum in western New York and the memory cafe taking place inside. The monthly events invite people with Alzheimer's , dementia , or other memory loss, and their caregivers, to spend time at the interactive museum. For visitors like Mario, who has dementia, and his wife, the scenes and artifacts from funny shows and comedians have a way of triggering shared laughs and connection, and, as comedy center staff have found, memories. Gail, 78, treasures the moments when Mario — who still vividly recalls his childhood route to school and the names of old friends — also recollects experiences from their shared life. A 1965 blind date after Mario got out of the Navy led to seven children, 24 grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, careers and moves. However, memories made over a lifetime together have become increasingly elusive over the past several years, since about the time Mario started to get lost driving and forget whether he likes a particular food. At a recent memory cafe, the Cirasundas, from suburban Buffalo, and others spent the morning walking through the museum that was inspired by 'I Love Lucy' star Lucille Ball in her hometown of Jamestown. Gail kept a guiding hand on her husband's elbow as they smiled through Johnny Carson bits from 'The Tonight Show' in the center's late night studio, browsed standup comic George Carlin's personal notes and comedian Bob Hope artifacts, and laughed out loud at a display of classic comedy props like the banana peel and pie in the face. During a break in the museum's restaurant, the 'Family Ties' video evoked scenes from real life. 'The moments are precious because he might not remember it,' Gail explained, 'but when you're there talking about it, you're remembering. Five minutes later, it's gone — but you had that moment.' The Alzheimer's Association estimates 7.2 million Americans over the age of 65 are living with Alzheimer's dementia, and an even higher number of people care for an impacted friend or family member. Memory cafes have emerged around the world in recent years as a way to connect and support individuals and caregivers, and provide information and resources. Many of the more than 600 cafes regularly running in the U.S. — often meeting in libraries and community centers — bring in speakers and engage participants with physical activity, music and art, all of which are good for the brain, experts say. The National Comedy Center held its first one earlier this year. It seemed a natural fit after staff heard from patrons about the museum's impact on their loved ones. Spokesman Gary Hahn sees the center as a kind of time machine, with exhibits memorializing comedy from Vaudeville to viral memes that can transport visitors back, no matter their age. Even before the formal memory cafes began, a visitor told the center's staff that his wife with dementia seldom spoke — but would become more verbal while walking through the museum and laughing alongside him. 'There was a stimulation of the part of the brain, whether it's because of the nostalgia or the comedy, that had an impact on her,' said Journey Gunderson, the center's executive director. Shelia Kennison, an author and psychology professor at Oklahoma State University, said humor positively affects physiology in many ways. 'It takes most of your brain to process what's being said or being shown to you and then to find the humor, and then once that happens, it sets off this cascade of brain activity and physiological changes that affects the whole body,' said Kennison, who studies how humor is involved in cognition, memory and overall wellbeing. 'So it really is a whole brain workout and a whole body workout when you get that really funny joke that makes you laugh and slap your knee and rock back and forth.' Laughter has always been important to Gail and Mario Cirasunda, whose children often gave their father Peter Sellers' 'Pink Panther' movies as gifts so they could see him laugh. 'Keep a sense of humor in your marriage,' Gail's boss told her before she got married. Even through the challenges, she said, she's followed the advice. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
