A hero's journey: Märkl puts his stamp (and ours) on 'Eroica'

Programming concerts involves giving shape to a season, not just to individual concerts. As  music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for the past 17 months, Jun Märkl has displayed both kinds of skill. He is advancing the orchestra as well as its Classical Series patronage. In his current spate of Hilbert Circle Theatre podium appearances, he is exploring thematic compatibility as well as idealism, technical polish and expressive breadth. Next week he and the orchestra will take us to the Scottish Highlands; other kinds of summitry have been on view this weekend and last.

The extraordinary demands of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony gave an extra wow to Valentine's weekend. How do you avoid a feeling of letdown after that? He couldn't have done better than doubling down on Mahler's identity as "the song-symphonist" with songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, then crowning that exploration with a Beethoven milestone, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major ("Eroica").

There will be another performance of those two works today, plus a contemporary tone-poem by a Taiwanese-American composer, Ke-Chia Chen. "Ebbs and Flows" was composed for the Taiwan Philharmonic's 2023 U.S. tour, Märkl conducting. "Ebbs and Flows" occupies the curtain-raiser position on the current program. On Friday night, it showed striking originality in contemplating the ocean, the work's title indicating ceaseless, complementary motion. Large bodies of saltwater are of course musically rooted in Debussy's "La Mer," the undeniable masterpiece of sea-girt composition.

I recall dimly another new piece thus inspired that the ISO played while its music director at the time was away from the podium. Raymond Leppard, known for his jaundiced view of much contemporary music, gave me a withering appraisal of a work he hadn't chosen; he found it leaden and rather inert, I inferred from his typically unbuttoned remarks. Whatever the title and composer were, I had taken it to be an evocation of the sea in its massiveness, in contrast to the Debussyan perspective of light and wind at play on the waves. For the Frenchman, it had to do with lots of turbulent water you can sort of see through and admire for its glinting surfaces between powerful surges.

"Ebbs and Flows" seems to present both viewpoints, the massive and the almost elfin. The work lays out a plethora of short phrases passed around at length. The cellos impress immediately with their lockstep assertiveness. It's quite a while until there's much flowing evident, but it emerges. And there's both oceanic mystery and the playfulness of waves and whitecaps to suggest Chen's individualistic take on "La Mer." 

Hints of marching rhythms are unexpectedly prominent. There was a sense of continual surprise, which landlubbers like me often feel when contemplating the ocean's ebbs and flows from the shore. I enjoyed the sense of astonishment the music credibly conveyed in both tone color and rhythm. The composer was present Friday to take a bow at the conductor's invitation.

Michelle DeYoung caught the full measure of Mahler's song.

The Mahler course in this weekend's feast brought onstage Michelle DeYoung, who replaced the originally scheduled mezzo-soprano soloist in songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. That collection of German folk poetry brought from the composer some of his most moving and expansive treatments of text and tune alike. With orchestral accompaniment of insight and illumination, DeYoung sang six songs in likeminded spirit.

I was almost put off by her cabaret manner in the first song, whose title translates to "St. Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish." That tune plays a significant role in the orchestra-only portion of the "Resurrection" Symphony, further linking the last two weekends' programs. But the broad humor of the text, with its satire of human insensibility to moral uplift (for a mammalian take with a similar human parallel, see George Orwell's "Animal Farm"), was taken up aptly and persuasively, I decided. And the way DeYoung inhabited each song filled out the audience's understanding, aided by the well-timed, line-by-line translations projected above the stage. 

The gestures and facial animation diminished when appropriate; DeYoung's hands were virtually still in the lonely expression of "I am lost to the world," the final selection, with text by Friedrich Rueckert. One could hardly avoid being won over earlier by the way she delved into the mysterious visit described in "Where the Fair Trumpets Sound," marvelously foreshadowed by brief trumpet fanfares. And then the listener could bask in the way it was all crowned by the controlled withdrawal of her voice as the song ends with the promise to "rest in my quiet realm, in my love, in my song." If that doesn't leave you verklempt, check your pulse.

The interpretation of the Beethoven Third, eagerly awaited, exceeded expectations.  The first movement was outstanding in the linking of one phrase to the next; nothing risked isolation or heavyhandedness. As the conductor suggested in podium remarks beforehand, the heroism the composer celebrates could as easily apply to everyone with a bit of the heroic spirit. We are invited to share in the symbolism. Although the composer never got rid of his fascination with Napoleon, as Michael Steinberg points out in his detailed examination of the "Eroica," the result of Beethoven's having torn up the page of dedication to the French general-turned-emperor was to lift the celebration to the plane of all humanity. You can be a hero too, maybe.

The elevation of the second-movement funeral march, so majestic in this Friday's performance, brought to mind one of Beethoven's most admired predecessor's tunes, "See the conquering hero comes" from Handel's  "Judas Maccabaeus." I was also struck by the forthrightness of the horns' exciting statements in the Trio of the Scherzo. One often hears this music modestly laid out, as if the players (or conductor) were dreading a "clam." None of that from the ISO musicians here! Proclaim it, they did, and flawlessly. The fast tempo of that movement's main section avoided the monumental, as if to indicate that you can't move toward heroism if you constantly envelop your quest in self-importance.  

Finally, the fourth movement Friday night had its abundant variety fully expressed, especially notable in the fugal episode. The struggle for freedom that Märkl suggested we all want to end in victory was undeniable here, and I need to cite Steinberg once again in a masterly phrase that this performance embodied through its final measures, which "fulfill [Beethoven's] 'heroic symphony' in triumphantly affirmative noise."