Sunday’s concert at the National Gallery of Art was devoted entirely to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D, and conductor Kim Allen Kluge led the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra to meet the now-wrenching, now-boisterous score — a searing emotional seesaw — with a full measure of acumen and passion.
The concert was part of the gallery’s series “Mahler on the Mall,” marking the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death. For more than three tumultuous decades, the conductor-composer turned heads wherever he went. When he directed Vienna’s powerful Philharmonic Orchestra and Opera, the city’s anti-Mahlerites showered their wrath on him. Spending the final three years of his life in New York, he led its Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera to new heights and was adored by musicians and the public alike.
In this tribute to Mahler’s magic, Kluge maintained the composer’s relentless inner pulse while keeping the vision of the whole. The conductor’s fluid rubatos caught the biting parody coating even in the achingly tender moments: the composer’s bucolic imagery of nature delicately voiced by the woodwinds, though interrupted by foreboding trumpet fanfares, and a nostalgic, yet uneasy Viennese waltz etched by the strings after a blustery country dance. Otherwise, the work was riddled with raging storms unleashed by the huge contingent of brass and percussion.
Both the instrumental soloists and orchestral sections contributed to the whole with accuracy and flourish. Kluge laced Mahler’s typical snatches of song tunes with winning abandon, while losing nothing of the finale’s angst-ridden fury, a simmering apotheosis of all that had gone before.
Porter is a freelance writer.
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