Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with generous amplification at Križanke

The Ljubljana International Orchestra has been gaining an ever stronger reputation among young musicians and top professional artists since its successful performances in Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Spain. The orchestra is made up of excellent young musicians who gain invaluable experience by playing in a symphony orchestra and work with renowned professors, conductors and soloists. Musicians from more than thirty-five different countries, and therefore from different cultures and social backgrounds, strive together for the highest performance goals. The orchestra’s repertoire covers both symphonic works of the Viennese Classical and Romantic periods and contemporary works of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sincere enthusiasm, youthful energy and unstoppable courage are the foundation for tackling the great masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire, which the musicians take on every year in several working phases. The orchestra has worked with soloists such as violist Wolfram Christ, trombonist Branimir Slokar, trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich, cellist Konstantin Pfiz, violinist Gregory Ahss and violist Gilad Karni. The orchestra’s concertmasters are Gregory Ahss (concertmaster of the Camerata Salzburg and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra), Janez Podlesek (professor at the Academy of Music) and Yuri Kalnits (soloist). Permanent members of the orchestra also include Konstantin Pfiz (cello), Knut Erik Sundquist (double bass), Jože Kotar (clarinet), Igor Ahss (bassoon), Zora Slokar (horn), Mihael Šuler (trombone) and Raymond Curfs (timpani). The Ljubljana International Orchestra is the cultural ambassador of the City of Ljubljana. It represents the Slovenian capital and portrays Ljubljana as a cosmopolitan city, a city of young people, creativity and opportunity. The orchestra’s principal conductor is Živa Ploj Peršuh. (Official presentation of the orchestra.)

This year the 70th Ljubljana Festival placed particular emphasis on the work of young musicians, somewhat in the spirit of what the world-famous maestro Riccardo Muti said on the stage of Gallus Hall at Cankarjev dom: that young musicians are the future of Western European culture, otherwise chaos will ensue. In Ljubljana, Muti performed with the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra.

The next foreign guest to perform with young musicians at this year’s festival was the celebrated conductor Daniel Barenboim, who gave two concerts with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up mainly of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians.

After the concert by the Ljubljana International Orchestra, the Slovenian Youth Orchestra will also take to the concert stage (on 25 August) under the baton of Živa Ploj Peršuih. The orchestra also includes members of the Youth Orchestra of Ukraine, who came to us as refugees.

Darko Berlek, director and artistic director of the Ljubljana Festival, mentioned at yesterday’s press conference that the time is coming when a youth orchestra made up of Ukrainian and Russian musicians will also be founded. We shall see. Even the Israeli-Palestinian orchestra has had not the slightest effect on ending military attacks in Israel and Paklestine, as we can see right up to today, when an eighteen-year-old Palestinian fell to Israeli gunfire.

In Ljubljana the conductor was the internationally acclaimed Portuguese conductor Osvaldo Ferreira, founder, artistic director and chief conductor of the Portuguese Philharmonic Orchestra. Before that he served as artistic director and chief conductor of the Algarve Orchestra, and was also artistic director of both the Algarve International Music Festival and the Oficina de Música de Curitiba in Brazil. As a guest conductor he has conducted in Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, Rome, Lisbon, Porto, Prague, Łódź, Katowice, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Cape Town, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, St Petersburg, London, Aspen and Chicago, where he gained his master’s degree in orchestral conducting. He completed his undergraduate studies at the St Petersburg Conservatory in the class of Ilya Musin. In 1999 he won a prize at the Sergei Prokofiev Competition in Russia. He attended the American Academy of Conducting at the eminent Aspen Music Festival in the USA, which then welcomed him into its fellowship reserved for a select few guests and participants of the festival. Osvaldo was assistant to conductor Claudio Abbado in Salzburg and Berlin. He further consolidated his studies with the Finnish conductor Jorma Panula and the American conductor and violinist David Zinman. He held scholarships from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal. In Ljubljana, after the concert, he met Darko Brlek and recalled their meeting in China.

The Fifth Symphony in C sharp minor marks an important turning point in Mahler’s output, as in it he stepped away from the symphonic creative concept he had pursued until then. From this symphony onwards, counterpoint became an important element of his composing. With its five movements, the Fifth Symphony departs from the classical model. Mahler also linked it thematically, dividing the five movements into three parts (the first two movements form the first part, the third movement the second part, and the fourth and fifth the third part). The symphony opens with a movement marked Funeral March: measured, strict, like a funeral procession. A paraphrase of a military march of the Austro-Hungarian army is heard, followed by a funeral march. The second movement (Stormily agitated, with the greatest vehemence) shares thematic material with the opening section. The third movement, Scherzo: vigorous, not too fast, which forms the second part of the symphony, is a lively movement whose form is harder to define, as it moves between rondo and sonata form.

In it he develops various thematic elaborations of a dance-like character, from waltzes to Ländler. The third part of the symphony consists of the fourth and fifth movements. The final part opens with the symphony’s most famous movement, the mysterious, bittersweet and dreamy Adagietto (Very slow). This movement appears as the main musical theme in the film classic Death in Venice, made in 1971 by the Italian director Luchino Visconti after the novella by Thomas Mann. With its otherworldly sound, the Adagietto has become very well known and is sometimes performed as a standalone work in arrangements for various ensembles and solo instruments.

The Adagietto is followed by the Rondo finale, the fifth movement, marked Cheerful, playful, lively. Although both movements avoid clear formal frameworks, they display sonata form. Mahler revised the Fifth Symphony several times up to his death, as he wanted to get to the bottom of all his unresolved questions about orchestration, and he died before he was truly satisfied with it. (From the programme notes by Metka Sulič).

The performance of Mahler’s symphony was practically entirely in the hands of the ‘mixing desk’, that is, the sound engineers, who set the volume and thereby shaped the audibility of the symphony in their own way, from the top of the Križanke Summer Theatre. When I asked them after the concert (there were three of them, though I do not know who was operating the sound) why the amplification was so strong, one of them replied that otherwise the double basses would not be heard. This appears to me in an entirely different light from what was said about the acoustic functionality of the auditorium itself after its renovation and for the needs of symphony concerts. It is not just about amplification, but about the competence of the people who deal with it; otherwise a new category of performer will have to be introduced in the programme, such as master of concert sound.

The orchestra was without doubt very well prepared, both the individual soloists (trumpet, clarinet, horn) and the individual sections. Throughout, one could sense the great commitment of the young musicians, their will and strength, their desire to belong to top-level music and to the performance of one of the best-known symphonic works – symphonies that give the performers themselves great satisfaction and, given their youth, make them aware of the importance of their lifelong decisions and of belonging to musical culture at an international level.

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in C sharp minor gives musicians everything they could wish for – practically every emotional shade, ranging from the funeral march to a dedication to love and joy in life as such, imbued with optimism, hope and trust in the power of music, which was fully realised in Mahler and his output. In the young musicians we admired their individual excellence as well as their ensemble playing, for which the greatest credit goes to their conductor Osvaldo Ferreira, with his rich international experience, although he has probably not conducted Mahler’s symphonies as often as some others in Central Europe whose recordings are practically legendary (Claudio Abbado). In Slovenia, the most Mahler symphonies were conducted by the late Anton Nanut.

With amplification, the Fifth Symphony sounded like a truly monumental work, with all its details, and of course its individual movements, such as the legendary Adagietto and the brilliant finale, the aforementioned soloists and sections (horns, trumpets, trombones with tuba, flutes). Given the acoustic situation on stage, all the “rear” sections seemed better than the strings in the foreground, but these are details that also raise the question of whether it would not have been more appropriate to have a few more strings, at least 60, which were not on stage this time. It seems that contemporary music-education trends favour woodwind and brass players over string players; young people, for instance, do not want to study the viola, as the violist Franc Avsenek, a professor at the Academy of Music, once lamented to me. The flute is in fashion; in Slovenia alone there are more than thirty young female flautists. The question of employment seems to be of secondary importance here, but that this is not so soon becomes apparent in all its “cruelty”. Let us hope that the young musicians who performed at Križanke are aware of their decision to pursue a career in music.