Review: A week after the Dallas Symphony’s Mahler Eighth, a gripping Ninth in Houston

HOUSTON — You know you’re living the good life if within nine days you’ve heard transcendent performances of Gustav Mahler’s last two completed symphonies. So what if, after the Dallas Symphony’s hair-raising Eighth Symphony May 15, it required a 240-mile trip south for the Houston Symphony’s white-hot Ninth on the 23?

May seems to have been a Mahler month in these parts. In the other direction, on May 2, both the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and Tulsa Symphony performed the composer’s Second Symphony. Farther afield, it made news May 9 and 10 when the 98-year-old Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt led the Ninth Symphony in Detroit — quite memorably, according to reports. Sadly, he nearly collapsed during a May 15 San Francisco Symphony performance of the Ninth, after which David Robertson stepped in scheduled repeats.

Why Mahler? Well, Mahler, who lived from 1860 to 1911, may have been the first truly modern composer. His music seems enduringly timely in its mix of hand-wringing and tenderness, violence and sadness, the earthy and the sublime. It’s music of intense emotions, of turbulent life and tragic death.

With boldly colored and elaborately textured orchestration, sometimes adding solo and choral voices, it’s also a major rite of passage for orchestras and conductors. It doesn’t “go” on auto-pilot. It needs fastidious timing and detailing, managing tensions over sometimes vast spans, giving coherence to bold contrasts of sound and affect. Give or take, both the Eighth and Ninth symphonies last about an hour and a half.

Having admired several previous Houston Symphony performances under Juraj Valčuha, the orchestra’s Slovakian music director since 2022, I couldn’t resist the chance to hear what he’d do with Mahler Nine.

Valčuha has something of the intensity of former DSO music director Jaap van Zweden, but with attention to fine points and subtleties reminding me of Claus Peter Flor, the DSO’s principal guest conductor from 1999 to 2008. Flor’s 2007 Mahler Ninth with the DSO was one of the mountaintop musical experiences of my nearly 27 years at The Dallas Morning News.

Valčuha’s Ninth had Flor’s emotional intensity, but also, with subtle detailing along the way, the German conductor’s feeling for and control over overarching musical forms and structures. Sounds could go from scorching climaxes to mere wisps of sounds with gripping inevitability.

Like Flor, Valčuha pushed some pianissimos to the edge of audibility, but with an electricity that could make your hair stand on end. I never imagined horns could play as softly as they did early in the first movement. As the finale faded away into nothing, violinists’ bows were barely moving.

Jones Performance Hall, the Houston Symphony’s home since 1966, has never been known for sonic warmth. With a newish stage shell and a newer reflective extension overhead, the orchestra has gained more visceral presence out in the room, but the sound now may be a little too bright. In an acoustic that hides nothing — so different from the sonic sumptuousness of Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony Center — the Houston orchestra gave Valčuha every extreme and every subtlety he asked for.

No composer writes more independent second violin parts than Mahler, and, as was the norm before the 1930s or so, he would have conducted with seconds on the right of the stage, opposite the firsts. The interaction of first and second violin parts loses impact when seconds are stuffed behind firsts on the left.

In the Ninth Symphony, Mahler actually assigns the nostalgic first theme to the second violins, the firsts joining only after some time.

Valčuha normally has all violins on the left, but for the Mahler — as with Flor and current DSO music director Fabio Luisi — they were divided left and right. In most orchestral performances, there are fewer second violins than firsts, but Valčuha had an even 16 in each section, and he visibly made a point of urging the seconds really to play out. The effect was revelatory.

Valčuha skillfully and sensitively handled first-movement transitions between sad reflection and stormy protest. He seamlessly integrated the second movement’s ländler — a kind of rustic waltz — and episodes more upper-crust waltz-like. Again and again, downbeats were fastidiously placed, not just automatically assumed.

The ensuing Rondo-Burleske stormed and stressed with sometimes scorching intensity. Violins produced an enormous sound for the finale’s opening outcry, smoothly fading to reflective reserve.

From first to last, Mahler’s symphonies are haunted by mortality. In the Ninth, is the finale’s disintegration into subtlest strands of sound, ultimately fading into nothing, a metaphor for death? Mahler had been diagnosed with a serious heart condition, and memories of a recently deceased daughter and long-ago deaths of multiple sisters and brothers were never far from his thoughts.

As if daring death, immediately upon finishing the Ninth Symphony Mahler plunged into composing his 10th. Only a year later he was dead at age 50, the 10th Symphony left unfinished — although several composers and conductors have essayed completions from the sketches. One of the most famous conductors of the time, Mahler didn’t even live to lead the Ninth Symphony, which was premiered in 1912, two years after its completion, conducted by the composer’s protégé Bruno Walter.

One hundred fourteen years later, it was gloriously performed in Houston.