For almost a century now, the world's best conductors have shown they "know how to listen," as Mahler hoped they would, to his Ninth Symphony. Saying where one conductor succeeds and another fails is always subjective at best and totally geeky at worst. Given the extraordinary chops required to even keep the baton in sync with the complex score guarantees that the work will end up in accomplished hands. Since Walter first conducted the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1912, maestros from Sir John Barbirolli to Pierre Boulez to Herbert von Karajan have unveiled countless great performances of the symphony, onstage and in the studio, from which no listener can walk away without having heard something masterful.

But conductors tune their own sensibilities, talents and times into a work, and in the past decade no conductor has been more in harmony with Mahler than Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony. Since 2001, Thomas and the top-flight orchestra have been recording a new cycle of Mahler's symphonies. So far, they have worked their way through six of the nine complete works (Mahler never finished his Tenth); in 2004, their radiant version of the Third won the Grammy for best classical album. This spring they released a sublime Ninth in what must be an emotional peak in the 60-year-old Thomas' acclaimed career.

Earlier this year, Thomas told Fanfare magazine the Ninth had always been special to him. It was the very first symphony he conducted as a professional, when he was 25 and with the Boston Symphony. "I felt the closest to it, I felt like I just understood everything it was about," he said. "I'm sort of more in a trance state with that one than with any one else; I feel like I'm stepping into this journey." Thomas' sojourn is remarkable for both getting inside the storm in Mahler's head and surfacing with a version that sounds fresh and modern. It's one that would surely suit the hairsplitting musician himself.

During his lifetime, Mahler was known primarily as a conductor. No artist was more famous in Vienna, the nucleus of European culture at the turn of the century -- stomping ground of Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud -- than "Herr Mahler," director of the Vienna Court Opera. Walter wrote that when Mahler "crossed the street, hat in hand, gnawing his lip or chewing his cheek, cabmen would turn to look at him and mutter, in tones of awe: 'Mahler himself!'" Gossip columnists incessantly wrote about his outbursts at musicians and singers who missed a cue, and his insistence on barring insouciant patrons who dared arrive a minute late for his performances.

The perfectionist conductor was also the meticulous composer. Alma relates the story of their daughter Anna, who as a little girl exclaimed to Mahler, "'Papi, I wouldn't like to be a note.' 'Why not?' he asked. 'Because then you might scratch me out and blow me away.'" Mahler himself said: "Everything must be heard, everything must sound." The "aspect of instrumentation in which I consider myself ahead of past and present composers can be summed up in a single word: clarity." He asserted that "each orchestral part should sound as though written for a human voice." This philosophy guides Thomas himself, who says with Mahler he strives to create "an overall sense of songfulness, so that the lines are played, as much as possible, as if they were being sung, with the kind of inflection and concept of breath that a singer would have, even in the music that's played by the strings."

Thomas' lyricism may surprise those who know his mentor was Bernstein, who sprung Mahler from cult status in America and exposed his symphonies to a wide audience. Bernstein harbored a grand vision of Mahler's music as "a camera that has caught Western society in the moment of its incipient decay." Only after the world suffered through Auschwitz, McCarthyism, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and South African apartheid, Bernstein wrote in 1967, "can we finally listen to Mahler's music and understand that it foretold it all."

Under Bernstein's baton, Mahler's mighty rhythms charged like locomotives, his melodies soared like Arctic winds, and his crescendos crashed into despairing hums. With Bernstein at the helm, the music achieved the one thing that new audiences valued most when they went to the symphony: having their minds blown. Thanks to Bernstein, Mahler was dynamite to the world's concert halls. Today, along with Mozart and Beethoven, Mahler is the one composer who can fill even the cheap seats.

In San Francisco, though, Thomas, like the marvelous Czechoslovakian conductor, Rafael Kubelik, dials down the Bernstein amplifier to magnify every line in Mahler's intricate scores. Thomas' precise and lyrical approach represents a perfect marriage of form and content in the Ninth. Without light in every note, the spare symphony can sound dim. Conversely, too much power can burn out its lambent glow. Adorno summarized Mahler's late work "as the density of the experience of fragility." Thomas handles the Ninth with care. The San Francisco Symphony sings the work electric.

At the end of the summer in 1909, when Mahler completed the Ninth, his mood was as bright as the sun. In September, he left the cold farmhouse in the Dolomites and traveled to Moravia, where he stayed with friends in their small castle in the country, not far from where he grew up. "I feel wonderful here!" he wrote to Alma. "Altogether, my stay here has done me a power of good. I can feel that it has put me at my ease. There's nothing for it: everyone needs warmth and sunshine. The thought of my various composing shacks fills me with horror. I may have spent the finest hours of my life in them, but my health has probably suffered in the process."

Mahler died on May 18, 1911, at age 50. He never heard the Ninth Symphony performed.

Recent Stories