Mahler Heavy Comes to Bangkok (February 10, 2010)

Austrian Composer Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler is an acquired taste. Although Mahler’s nine symphonies have never left the standard repertory, it took Leonard Bernstein to light a fire under the musical world to pay attention to Mahler and then to revere him. Still, it takes a lot of patience and concentration to listen to most Mahler symphonies, and even then, it isn’t exactly clear what one has heard. This is especially true of Mahler’s last completed symphony, his Ninth. To describe its one hour and twenty minutes length as “heavy,” is a better description of it than “tedious” or “boring.”

While composing his Ninth, Mahler may have been suffering from an identity crisis. Mahler was struck by the new music of Arnold Schoenberg, and chromaticism, dissonance and atonality are major parts of this symphony, interweaving themselves with melody and romanticism. Commentators seems to universally associate the symphony with death, the idea being that Mahler was contemplating his own demise (he did die a year or so after finishing the Ninth) and feared that this would be his last musical composition. While scholars debate whether this is true or not, inasmuch as Mahler was already working on his 10th symphony when he died, this type of analysis does little to assist the listener. What, then, does help?

First, the listener needs to make an investment and a commitment. The commitment needed is easy to state: be prepared to sit still and be quiet, really still and really quiet, and listen uninterruptedly for almost an hour and a half. This alone may bring rewards, but is not so easy to do in this age of sound bites and hand-held electronic devices, which apparently require frequent checks from their owners, both in and out of the concert hall. Then, it’s a good idea to listen to this work a few times before the live concert, as I did. Familiarity with the music is a great assist to enjoying a live performance of an unfamiliar work, and for finding meaning in the music.

It took 100 years for Mahler’s Ninth to reach Bangkok, and Thailand’s musical eminence, Somtow Sucharirkul, is to be commended for brining this difficult work to a Bangkok audience for the first time on February 10, 2010. Amazingly enough, with the balconies closed off, the main floor of the Thai Cultural Center was quite full when the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra wandered on stage about 30 minutes late (no explanation was given), followed by portly Maestro Somtow floating in dressed in a bright purple tailcoat. Let’s say this about the performance: it was a good try, but one that is unlikely to be repeated in Bangkok for another 100 years.

A Nostalgic Trip to Broadway

On December 22, 2009, I saw Finian’s Rainbow at the St. James Theater on 44^th Street and Broadway. Both the musical and the theatre hold memories for me.

The St. James Theatre housed the original production of Oklahoma (March 31, 1943- May 29, 1948), which was Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s first collaboration. Toward the end of the run, in 1947 or 1948, my parents took my brother Jerry and me to see what was then an unprecedented smash hit (2,212 performances). I was age nine and my brother was age seven. We had very good orchestra seats and I remember the experience well. It was my first theatre experience and I was totally captivated by what happened on the stage. It was magic and it was very real to me to the point where I recall being quite scared during the number “Poor Judd is Dead.”

My grandfather, who died before I was born, played the flute and we had his wooden flute on display in a bookshelf in my house, a fact which, during the intermission, I told to one of the members of the pit orchestra. I don’t remember his reply, but I do remember that he treated this bit of information kindly.

So, some 63 years ago, was the beginning of my life-long love of the musical theatre. How wonderful of my parents to introduce me to the theatre at such a young age, when, I’m sure, many parents would opt not to spend the money because they wouldn’t want to “waste money” on something a nine-year old couldn’t appreciate or remember. I’ve returned to the St. James several times over the years, to see Where's Charley? (1950), The Pajama Game (1955), The Producers (2001), and again, today, to see the revival of Finian’s Rainbow.

At Great Neck High, every second year, the students put on a musical show, and in 1955, it was my class’s turn to choose the show. Finian’s Rainbow, which had opened on Broadway in 1947, had won several Tony awards (there was no best musical category in those years), and was a hit show with 725 performances, was a natural for a student production. Although I had some ambitions to act in the show, I didn’t pass the tryouts (thereby being saved by wise teachers from a lifelong embarrassment), and, instead, played percussions in the pit orchestra of which I had been a member throughout high school. Through many, many hours of rehearsal, and two exciting nighttime performances, I got to know every note in the score and every line in the script. When my visit to New York City coincided with the Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow, there was no question about not attending.

Because this revival is such an accomplished, idiomatic re-production of this masterpiece from Broadway’s golden age, I now have a new memory of the show, which has replaced any original images of the show I may still be carrying in my consciousness. It is difficult to know why such a dated, corny plot seems so alive today. The superb score by Yip Harburg and Burton Lane, which propels the thin plot forward with such enduring standards as “How Are Things in Glacamora” and “Old Devil Moon,” is the glue that keeps the script together, and when the music stops and the dialogue begins, you wait impatiently for the next musical number to begin and, thanks to the ingenuity of the show’s creators, the audience is not kept waiting long. The producers of this production cut 20 minutes of dialogue from the original show, which probably offends purists, but greatly aids the forward momentum of this revival. Such minor tinkering is nothing compared to the way opera companies are massacring classic opera with new “conceptions” in staging.

There were several young people in the audience surrounding me, and at the end of the show, I asked several of them if they liked it. They uniformly said they did, and one 20-something year old told me it was “exciting.” The critics mostly raved about this production, (e.g. from the WSJ “I don't think I've ever seen a more musically satisfying Broadway show than "Finian's Rainbow"), and even though this production has now become my very own version of the show, I still can’t get out of my mind the sound from the 1947 original cast album, of Ella Logan singing “How Are Things in Glacamora.”

Chinese-Malaysian Pianist Cheong Yew Choong Makes Bangkok Debut

Accompanied by Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate degrees from the University of West Virginia, Chinese-Malaysian pianist Cheong Yew Choong, (picture left). who was born in Kuala Lumpur, played a very satisfying debut recital at Bangkok’s Goethe Institute on February 4, 2010. With his opening selections of three Scarlatti sonatas, Choong established himself as a cerebral pianist able to cleanly articulate the rapid and tricky passages of these difficult baroque works. In the Chopin Barcarolle which followed, Choong’s emotionally detached approach was less successful; a little less care and some abandon would have added greatly to an otherwise enjoyable performance.

Congratulations to Choong for departing from the mainstream repertory to introduce his small, but attentive, audience to two works from two unknown contemporary South American composers, Tania Leen and Miguel del Aguila. The percussive and exciting “Conga” from Aguila is well worth additional listening.

The final half of the program was devoted to Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B minor. While Choong clearly feels this music, his accomplished technique was not quite up to the demands of sustaining this long and difficult piece, and matters were not helped by the fact that Choong did not have a concert grand to perform on. Still, it was beautifully played. Cheong Yew Choong is now on the music faculty of USCI University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Should he decide to return to Bangkok, he can count on me to be in the audience.