Spokane Symphony takes on Mahler’s ‘monster’

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is a serious undertaking. It runs nearly 100 minutes, it leapfrogs from one distinct style to another and it requires an orchestra of 200 or so. Mahler isn’t known for his brevity, but this is the longest piece in his oeuvre, and he reportedly referred to it as “My Monster.”

The Spokane Symphony continues its season with a Classics program devoted entirely to the Austrian composer’s landmark piece, which was performed in full for the first time in 1902. Because of its size, it’s not often played – the orchestra last took it on in 1997 – but symphony conductor Eckart Preu calls it a “symphonic benchmark” in any musician’s career.

“It’s a massive piece,” Preu said, “in the length of the piece, the content of the piece, the diversity of the piece and the amount of people required to pull it off. In terms of content, it’s very ambitious.”

In order to accommodate the musicians who will be performing the Mahler symphony, the movable walls of the Fox Theater’s stage will be taken down, and a handful of parts will actually be performed from backstage. The orchestra will be fleshed out by several musicians from Whitworth University, and the symphony chorale will be joined by the Spokane Area Youth Choir.

Kristina Ploeger, the symphony’s new chorale director, says she wasn’t familiar with the piece before the symphony added it to this upcoming program.

“This is a piece that a college would never do,” she said. “A normal college could not mount this piece, because of the scope of the orchestra and the expertise you need in an orchestra. … This is exactly why I wanted this job, to do this kind of music.”

Mahler’s original title for the symphony was “A Midsummer Morning’s Dream,” and it follows a loose narrative reflecting on the power of nature. It’s Mahler’s attempt, Preu says, to channel his own worldview through music.

“The good thing about Mahler is he wrote a lot of letters explaining what he was doing, so we can retrace a lot of those ideas,” Preu said. “He tries to imitate sounds of nature in interesting ways. There are these phenomenal soft spots where there’s basically nothing, just the stillness of the nature. And then the brutality of nature – there’s a storm, of course. You have to have a storm.

“(Mahler) said to write a symphony is like creating a world, and that’s kind of what this is. It’s a musical world in itself.”

The chorale comes into play during the symphony’s fifth movement, which is titled “What the Angels Tell Me.” The arrangement features only soprano and alto parts and requires a children’s choir, as the vocalists channel a chorus of puckish cherubs (Mahler noted that this section should be “cheeky in expression”).

“It has a certain naughtiness to it, I find,” Preu said.

“It’s impish,” Ploeger added. “There’s a mischief to it.”

“The diversity of the musical language that’s in there is quite staggering,” Preu said. “It never really gets boring.”

Above all, the piece was designed to produce an astounding musical power, and it will be presented with a midway intermission. It’s a challenging piece, both for the musicians and for listeners.

“Sometimes you have to put some more weights onto your usual workout,” Preu said. “You have to push yourself to the next level, and that takes everything out of everybody. Musically, it’s a big, big challenge for us. It’s great for a city of this size to have an orchestra that can actually mount a piece like that successfully.”

“You have to have a conductor that can take all those pieces and be attentive to so many different things,” Ploeger said. “It’s a big boy piece. You need a conductor who can handle all those parts. You don’t send in the lightweights on this one. You need a heavyweight conductor, and that’s why we can do it here.”