Writing in The American Scholar, Sudip Bose said of David Taylor playing Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger”: “Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such revelatory and shocking interpretations. . . . The pathos was unrelenting, almost too much to bear. . . . Taylor’s Schubert performances have been haunting me ever since. I cannot get them out of my mind.”
It was I who introduced David Taylor to “Doppelgänger.” I have often partnered his unpredictable renditions of this and other late Schubert songs. Our Mahler/Schubert concoction, “Einsamkeit,” has been heard in New York and at the Brevard Music Festival. We’re now working up a version of Schubert’s ruthlessly despondent song cycle Winterreise.
The trek from late Schubert to Mahler is short and turbulent. Hence: Mahlerei, my concertino for bass trombone and chamber orchestra, created for Taylor and premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2022. A revised version, abetted by Daniel Schnyder, will be performed at Boulder’s ever- ambitious Colorado Mahlerfest on May 15.
I’ve taken the Scherzo from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and turned it into a kind of Yiddish chant, with the melodic line – which Mahler shares generously – piled onto Taylor’s horn as a bumptious moto perpetuo. There are sundry surprises along the way. And I must say: it works. (The Washington Post called it “a strange and strangely satisfying experiment.”)
This year’s 37th annual Colorado Mahlerfest explores two relationships: Mahler and Schubert; Mahler and Richard Strauss. There are six concerts, a symposium, and a mountain hike. The repertoire includes Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet (adapted by Mahler), Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. Mahlerei kicks off the festival on a program otherwise mainly exploring childhood, with music by Schubert, Wagner, Humperdinck, Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
I call my symposium talk, on Schubert and Mahler, “Taverns in Heaven” – a reference to the intrusion of a Bierhaus zither midway through the sublime Andante of Schubert’s E-flat minor Klavierstuck (which I am eager to perform). I’ll also be examining Mahler’s annotated Vienna and New York scores for Schubert’s Ninth, which (on the podium) he turned into something utterly and provocatively Mahlerian.
Many essays in this space have griped that today’s conductors are seldom bona fide “music directors.” Colorado Mahlerfest is curated by a gifted conductor who is also a writer, a thinker, and an artistic administrator: Kenneth Woods, who (though American) serves as principal conductor and music director of the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester, UK.
In 2026, the Mahlerfest topic will be “Mahler the Man” and the festival events will include a professional staging of my play The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (a spin-off from my recent novel with the same title).
You can read more about Colorado Mahlerfest here.
You will find the complete 2024 festival schedule for this May here.
