LENOX - There is a famous story about the conductor Bruno Walter paying a visit to Gustav Mahler at his lakeside hut during a period when the great composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Walter arrived and was taking in the view of the awe-inspiring mountains when the composer quipped that his friend didn’t really have to bother looking. He had written it all into his symphony.
The anecdote, from Walter’s book on Mahler, may be exaggerated or invented outright but it captures something about the myth of this composer as transcriber of the natural sublime. But the correspondences between the external world and the interior workings of his symphonies were not always as direct. The Sixth for instance presents an enduring puzzle for commentators seeking easy links between life and art. The years of 1903 and 1904, when Mahler wrote this work, were perfectly happy years of family life with Alma and his children. His career was flourishing, all was sunshine. And yet the composer created a turbulent work of shadows, militant marches, violent collisions in sound, and even a series of colossal hammer blows in the final movement. Mahler did not need actual catastrophe in order to feel it deeply in his music.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performances of the Sixth last fall were among the most rewarding of the season, and James Levine and the BSO returned to the work on Friday night at Tanglewood, giving it another viscerally charged, smoldering performance. The first movement hints at the vast rhetorical space the work will fill, from the ferocious drive of the opening march, motored on Friday night by a particularly robust bass section, to the soaring rhapsodic “Alma theme,’’ here spun out by the first violins with ample light and warmth.
After having experimented in Symphony Hall with the open-to-debate ordering of the inner movements, Levine here placed the balm-like Andante as the second movement, which had a way of balancing out the energy of the entire work. He paced the finale for maximum dramatic effect, and in the closing moments drew from the orchestra a massive and spine-tingling wall of sound, surely the loudest music heard this summer. The brass rose to the occasion and the trumpets in particular deserved the solo bow they received.
Before the Mahler, Leon Fleisher was on hand as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. He brought a welcome lightness of touch and pellucid grace to the outer movements, though there was a compressed feel to some of his passagework. There is also a rapt, inward-looking quality in his playing these days that does not always translate well in the vast Koussevitzky Music Shed. Listening to the slow movement on Friday felt a bit like overhearing the mysterious whispers of an artist conversing with himself.
There was a lot more Mozart in the air yesterday afternoon, as Levine and the orchestra traversed the composer’s final three symphonies - Nos. 39, 40, and 41, “Jupiter.’’ Last season in Symphony Hall, this was the dessert program that capped Levine’s extended survey of lesser-known Mozart symphonies, but at Tanglewood it was the entire meal. So it often goes in summer.
The orchestra sounded like it still had the benefits of last season’s Mozart workout in its collective muscle memory. These were vibrant, sharply etched performances. Levine took the Adagio opening of No. 39 at a slow and leisurely pace and the finale at a controlled sprint. He brought out the play of shadows in the minor-key No. 40. And the “Jupiter’’ was a wedding of transparency and visceral expression. The orchestral playing throughout was buoyant and clear, though Levine did not shy away from piling up hefty orchestral textures in order to make an expressive point, as if to say let early music fashions be damned.
Next weekend is the conductor’s last for the season at Tanglewood. David Robertson will also be on hand with an intriguing all-American program featuring works by Harris, Thomson, Barber, and Bernstein.
