Paavo Järvi on Mahler

Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi has been music director of the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich since 2019, during which time he has already built up an impressive collection of recordings on Alpha Classics of music by Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, John Adams, Orff, and Messiaen, as well as a set of Mendelssohn symphonies that was one of our Top Ten Classical Recordings of 2024. 

Now they embark upon a survey of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler with the release of the first instalment in the cycle, Symphony No. 5. I spoke to Paavo about his early exposure to the composer’s music listening at home to recordings with his father (the conductor Neeme Järvi), how Mahler’s own experience as a conductor helps inform interpreters of his music today, and his thoughts on the meaning behind the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, perhaps best-known from its use in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film based on the Thomas Mann novella, Death in Venice.

How did you first encounter Mahler's music, and were there any particular interpretations that had a big impact on you? 

My first contact with Mahler was at home when I was growing up, and it was particularly the Fourth Symphony. My father collected recordings of the Fourth, and I remember comparing the beginning of maybe fifteen versions to see how different conductors handled the rallentando with the sleigh bells into the first section. The rest of the symphonies were not really played much in the Soviet period, so my Mahler experiences came later when I moved to the US, and it became a kind of obsession of mine: I’d go to every performance I could possibly attend.

That obsession had a lot to do with Bernstein and his relentless and incredibly passionate championing of Mahler's music. He was not only one of the great interpreters but also one of the great personalities, and personality is something that's very powerful. The first symphony I conducted was No. 5, and from that point it became central in my repertoire. There are many other composers I probably could easily live without, but not Mahler.

What about the Tonhalle's own history with Mahler? Of course they recorded a cycle with David Zinman, but beyond that? 

There were many great conductors from Haitink to Solti and so on who would go there regularly to conduct Mahler, and so both Mahler and Bruckner are very much home territory. And the Tonhalle also has the right kind of sound for it. Mahler's music has a lot to do with understanding the nuances of the old-world playing, particularly the portamenti, glissandi, and the sounds of Eastern and Central European string playing. One needs also to be very at home with all the folk music that Mahler was surrounded with. There's a mishmash of quotations from all kinds of ethnic styles - Hungarian, Romanian, Yiddish and Jewish folk - and all of that is a little bit easier if you come from that part of Europe.

You have said that you wanted to wait for the right moment to record this cycle, both in your own journey and also your relationship with the orchestra. Why was it that you felt that time had now come?

We always look for that right moment. I feel this particular music requires a lot of experience. You need to have been able to do it many times, rethink it, redo it, fix it, correct it, and just become very connected to the piece. It’s also a question of personal development and a process of maturity which you can’t fast-track. A person who has had children, for instance, is a different person than someone who hasn't, and a person who has gone through a war is a different person than one who hasn't. It's not necessarily even very dramatic events, it's just life. I think I'm now at an age where I've gone through a lot of these things, and I've had enough time to play these symphonies many times and try them out differently. 

It's not always just a technical aspect, it's more the feeling of how something should sound, and in order to get close to that you need to have a relationship with an orchestra that knows how you think, where you've had a chance to develop a certain trust and understanding.

Your earlier performances with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra have been preserved on DVD and blu-ray, so I'm curious how much you find yourself altering your approach with a different orchestra based on what they give back to you?

Well, a conductor's task is really to listen. Very often musicians do something wonderful that you didn't expect or didn't think would be an option, and you listen and say, oh, this is actually much better than what I was going to ask for. So it's always a give and take, but ultimately when you go to a new orchestra, you have to listen to what they are giving you. In some orchestras, they have done half of the work, because there is a complicity in their understanding that is very similar to your own. In other cases, there are certain traditions that are very ingrained and which I don't necessarily always like, and then you have to spend some time undoing them.

Were there some symphonies that took you longer to connect with and unlock?

Six and seven were the last ones that became part of my natural understanding of Mahler, but actually they have become my favourites, and I think it's often like that: the things that are a bit enigmatic and don't reveal themselves easily can become the favourite. But they are incredible pieces: every single Mahler symphony in its own way is a masterpiece, a summit, a gem. Out of the nine and a half symphonies there is not one that you can say is weaker or stronger, it is just a totally convincing universe of its own.

You say nine and a half: are you planning to do the whole of the Tenth, or just the Adagio? How do you feel about the Deryck Cooke performing version of the unfinished symphony?

Just the Adagio. It's very subjective, but similarly I don't do the last movement of Bruckner 9. Regardless of how much Mahler left, and I know exactly how many pages he left, I've done all the homework and I've talked to specialists, nobody alive (and it's the same with Bruckner) has an iota of talent next to Mahler. Deryck Cooke was an incredibly able person, and it's a view of how Mahler would possibly have done it. As such, it's a great piece, but it's not Mahler. I might even do it one day, I just don't think that we need it as part of this cycle.

Mahler was constantly tinkering with the orchestration of his music while he was conducting it himself. Does that help when you're preparing the scores, knowing that he was such an accomplished conductor, and is everything more or less there or do you find you have to tweak things slightly to make them work?

Mahler was a conductor with an attitude of: if it doesn't work, make it work. His markings are sometimes almost obsessively precise, and yet knowing that he was somebody who was always willing to change and valued intuition more than anything else is very helpful for a conductor. On one hand, we need to take everything he writes incredibly seriously, but on the other hand, a lot of the markings can be interpreted in different ways. So ultimately it's the job of the conductor in the moment, and you might be in a situation where you feel that in order to achieve what you think Mahler wanted, you need to make some changes.

I was thinking particularly of the opening trumpet solo of the Fifth, where the overall marking is 'In gemessenem Schritt. Streng' ('In a measured tempo. Strict'), but then Mahler also suggests that the triplets should be 'flüchtig' ('fleeting'). How do you reconcile things like that to make it all work? 

Mahler was a master of metaphor: he knew exactly how to bring us to the right state of mind for a certain kind of gesture. In this case he also writes 'Wie ein Kondukt'. 'Kondukt' is a military funeral, and military trumpets would play those triplets in a particular way. He wanted to make sure that in future generations when he's not around to correct it, they would play it more or less close enough to the kind of old-time bugle style, so when he writes 'flüchtig', it doesn't necessarily mean that he wants it to be faster, just that it needs to be idiomatic.

Everything is stylised and needs to come across as authentic: when you have a funeral march or a Ländler, there are all kinds of little stylistic things that cannot be written down. He has to rely on the understanding of the people who are performing, of knowing the little rubati that are totally organic for a person who grew up in that area and are totally foreign to a person who just studies and takes it at face value. Even the glissandi, the portamenti, he probably didn't have to write them in for those original players, but he knew that future generations might not do them any more unless he notated them. At that time, that's just the way strings were played. Now, people are always smiling, thinking that it's in bad taste. But he wanted that old-world sound, and that's why he writes portamenti. So we benefit from his knowledge as a conductor.

Mahler famously referred to tradition as 'Schlamperei' ('sloppiness'): how do you balance the old traditions against forging your own way of interpretation?

When he meant tradition, he probably didn't mean the traditional way of playing waltzes or Ländler: I think he meant the sort of big rallentandi and all this pomposity that had become standard practice where everything had to be serious, and if it's serious then it has to be slow. All of these heavy Wagnerian traditions were then applied to everything from Mozart to Haydn to Bach. I think that's what he meant with his comment.

One tradition I noticed you honoured was with the obligato horn in the third movement of the Fifth Symphony, where you have the player standing at the front of the orchestra.

Yes, that's actually written in the score: it says that the obligato horn should stay away from the horn section. It really comes across as a dialogue, and is very effective: you feel like there is a solo voice, a different voice.

On a similar note, do you ask the horns to stand up at the end of the First Symphony?

Of course! It's not the same if they don't. Mahler was a fantastic opera conductor, and he considered his sense of theatricality to be one of his great achievements. He wanted to elevate the piece and to bring the coda to a level further than had already been happening. So if the horns stand up, it elevates not only the audience, which of course is the main thing, but also they play differently. The whole orchestra somehow feels something unusual and special. It's not just the volume, it's also a visual effect. If you see it, you hear it.

What are your thoughts on the Adagietto movement of the Fifth, and what does the word 'Adagietto' itself mean to you? Is it a tempo indication, or something else?

I think it's a diminutive, like if your daughter is called 'Adagio' and you endearingly call her 'Adagietto'! We know that Mahler sent it to Alma as a love letter, but it’s a misunderstanding to think that a love letter should be full only of love, it can be much more complex than that and not necessarily all positive. This music is full of passion and pain, and a love letter can also be full of pain, frustration and resignation. Look at Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, for instance. So making it overly nice is a big mistake, and can often lead to a performance becoming weakened and one-dimensional.

I find it fascinating to hear the huge variety of tempos in recordings of this movement, with Mengelberg coming in at just over seven minutes, and then at the other extreme, Haitink double the length at very nearly fourteen minutes. 

Yes, but on the other hand, there are timings from Mahler's own performances that are quite varied. So it actually makes no difference how many minutes it is - it's how it's played and what is being said at that moment. Certainly, there are traditions that came from the Visconti film where it's all about death and so on. And death is also probably a subject that one can find in a love letter: he certainly knew of his heart condition, and there was enough tragedy going around. We tend to take these little words and make them very simplistic, like "oh, it's not a funeral march, it's a love letter". Well, yes, on the surface you can say that, but I think a love letter is filled with an incredible range of emotions.