By Alex Ross
The New Yorker

In the face of serious illness, the conductor led two memorable programs at the L.A. Phil.

The molten monument that is Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is routinely described as the work of a man facing imminent death. It took shape in the summer of 1909, two years after Mahler was given a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease. Leonard Bernstein liked to argue that the strange, staggered pulse of the opening bars replicates symptoms of Mahler’s condition. The immense emotional range of the symphonic narrative that ensues—desperate longing, false triumph, vertiginous collapse, desolate meandering, damaged nostalgia, rancid rage, full-throated lament—finds resolution in twenty-seven legendarily transcendent bars for strings alone. The markings tell the story: adagissimo (as slow as possible), mit inniger Empfindung (with deep feeling), aüsserst langsam (extremely slow), ersterbend (dying away). Mahler died in 1911, with his Tenth Symphony unfinished.

The trouble with doom-laden readings of the Ninth—for Bernstein, it presaged not only its composer’s death but also “the death of tonality . . . the death of music itself . . . the death of society, of our Faustian culture”—is that Mahler’s entire œuvre dwells on mortality. If he had died at any earlier stage, his music could have been said to foretell his demise just as clearly. Furthermore, as the Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange argued, the composer’s mood after the diagnosis was far from hopeless. In a 1908 letter to his younger colleague Bruno Walter, Mahler wrote that, although he sensed something amiss in his heartbeat, he was not consumed by a “hypochondriacal fear of death.” Instead, he felt as though he were undergoing a metamorphosis: “At the end of a life, I must learn once again to walk and stand like a beginner.”

That sentence passed through my mind when, in mid-January, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a technically flawless, emotionally charged performance of the Ninth at Disney Hall. The conductor was Michael Tilson Thomas, who, after decades of eternal boyishness, is now an elder sage of the profession. In the summer of 2021, Tilson Thomas learned that he had glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. His prognosis is considerably more dire than the one Mahler faced in 1907. As Tilson Thomas walked to the podium, I wondered whether he would address the audience. He is known as one of our more talkative conductors, and no one there would have begrudged him some remarks—particularly since he was born in Los Angeles, seventy-eight years ago.

Yet he remained silent, acknowledging the crowd with a couple of bows and a friendly wave of the hand. His interpretation of Mahler’s valediction gave little sign of being weighed down by Bernsteinian baggage. It was, to be sure, quite slow, extending well past the ninety-minute mark; but Tilson Thomas always tends to take his time in Mahler, as is evident in his recorded cycle with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1995 to 2020. This was a spacious, nuanced, sumptuously colored account of the Ninth, free of excess angst or frenzy. The work came across less as an interior drama than as an exterior landscape of mountainous vastness, its catastrophes more seismic than psychic.

The final Adagio stopped time, for a full half hour. Rather than try to wring meaning from every phrase, Tilson Thomas seemed content to maintain his hypnotic slow beat and let the strings bask in the golden-hour harmony. The coda was eerily calm, with phrases, chords, and single notes suspended like thin brushstrokes on a white canvas. Tilson Thomas has long admired the modernist master Morton Feldman, who composed at the edge of silence. The final page of the Ninth came across, enthrallingly, as a prophecy of Feldman, of music’s future. Without words, Tilson Thomas was teaching one more lesson through the music that he loves.