Live: Los Angeles Philharmonic
MUSIC REVIEW
Christoph Eschenbach leads the L.A. Phil in a grippingly dramatic Sixth Symphony.
Christoph Eschenbach's performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony on Saturday night was extraordinarily focused, exceptionally well-played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, I thought, grippingly dramatic. His approach, which valued rhythm to a high degree and treated meter as the complex life force controlling this long symphony (sometimes called the "Tragic"), seemed to confirm something I've long suspected about the German pianist-turned-conductor. He must have been born with a golden metronome in whatever part of the brain it is that controls our pulse.
For 89 minutes, from the driving opening to the final explosion, the Sixth, the only work on the program, felt like a train ride through a war zone. We witnessed life going on through the windows. Despite the presence of troops and the constant sense of impending danger and an atmosphere of lamentation, people still fell in love, danced, ate and drank, and dreamed of warm days in the country. Cowbells rang in the distance, and for a fleeting moment or two, we too could allow ourselves to be oblivious.
The rails weren't straight, so we slowed down and sped up, often unexpectedly. The windows were kept spotless, so we saw everything. But we couldn't get off and certainly couldn't change fate. A shell could at any moment have blown us to smithereens. In the end, one did.
Back to Eschenbach and rhythm. This is a difficult subject, one that I don't understand and that perhaps, given his troubles in Philadelphia and Paris (cities where he heads orchestras that have not renewed his contracts), some musicians may not either. One part of Eschenbach's music making is a thrilling rhythmic rigidity. In the 1970s, as a young pianist, he made some recordings of Schubert sonatas so excitingly pulse-centric that he all but turned a 19th century Viennese master into a 20th century American Minimalist.
Another side of Eschenbach, though, is his sense of structural fluidity. Traditionalists complain that he fusses too much, that he'll slow down or speed up for no apparent reason. On the one side, he's a cold machine; on the other, he's willful. But when things go well, he's simply making music work the way the body operates. The heart beats. The pulse is always there, but we proceed as if we are independent of biological patterns.
