Mahler mainstreamed: ISO returns to the challenge, building a legacy with his symphonies

Mahler on ship back to Europe, 1911, near the end of his death-haunted life

Veteran of two runs through the American Piano Awards and victorious the second time last year, Michael Davidman is the guest soloist this weekend with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, anchoring the concert's first half on Beethoven before the ensemble expands and takes on extra cargo for Mahler's Symphony No. 1 in D major. 

There was lots of glory in its performance Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre, right through to the eight horns standing and pouring extra energy into the concluding measures. That recalled the similar display in the ISO's Mahler Sixth last spring, crowning music director Jun Märkl's affinity for the late-Romantic composer. 

But first to the program's music of more scaled-back energy, reliant on a transformative composer's roots in the Classical period of Mozart and Haydn. A compact account of Beethoven's rarely indulged dramatic flair opened the concert: "The Creatures of Prometheus" Overture. 

Then it was time for the locally well-regarded Davidman to stand out, playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, op. 19,  and displaying his pearly runs, mastery of hushed dynamic levels, and, in the finale, an elfin wit and feeling for suspense.

In the first movement, he showed how contrasts of voices and registers clarify the structure of the cadenza Beethoven provided. Before that illumination, however, he delivered a patch of odd phrasing, some of it out of harmony, near the end of the opening statement. In the Adagio, the soloist's thoughtful, deliberate manner seemed borderline precious. But he won me over in the last movement, reflecting the panache the young Beethoven must have displayed as he built a virtuoso career in his adopted home of Vienna. Davidman then charmed the audience with two encores: "Malaga" from Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" and "Foglio d'Album," an early piano piece by Giacomo Puccini.

APA head Chris Williams beams as Michael Davidman holds 2025 award.

In this concerto, it's evident that the Beethoven of revolutionary stature was yet to emerge.  As a  symphony composer he created a precedent for finales bearing a composition's definitive expressive weight. Beethoven's third, fifth and, especially, ninth symphonies showed the way, and in Mahler's startling debut as a symphonist there is a lengthy, often tumultuous peroration to a piece that begins in the near-silence of the natural world. 

The work carries the title "Titan" to honor a German novel that seems not to have been the generating force behind Mahler's composition, yet titanic power threads its way toward triumph in the end. Still, the composer tended to be of two minds when it came to giving verbal signposts to his music. 

The finale is long and variegated, so dramatic in its ebbs and flows that some conductors in its early history favored cuts that actually undercut the music's message of hard-won victory. The mixed signaling of the march form, both pressing forward and conveying discipline, restraint and resistance to fate (as ISO patrons will experience later this season in the first movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony) keeps company with a lyrical theme and nostalgic recall of the first movement.

Signs of Märkl's mastery as an interpreter of the "Titan" symphony included the precise cut-offs of vigorous phrases in the finale heralding the introduction of some sweet contrast. The orchestra invariably responded to and embodied the abruptness of the changes. Yet always, as becomes crystal-clear in the sublimity of his Resurrection Symphony (which the ISO played last season), Mahler's eye is on an imagined world not subject to change and disruption: the dream of deathless eternity. Friday's performance conveyed that transcendence, too.

I've been reading Anne Carson's poetry recently in response to her winning the Nobel Prize, and one line of hers seems to apply to Mahler's peculiar quality of yearning for something beyond reality while marking in detail the many forms of its transience. She writes:  "For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?"

Measuring time, sometimes at lengths that put some music-lovers off, is what Mahler's music does with relentless focus and elaboration, starting with his symphonic debut.

But eternity remains, glowing in the long view. So it seemed indelible as the ISO finished a magnificent reading of the Mahler First.