Γκούσταβ Μάλερ: το Τραγούδι της Γης

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Gustav Mahler finished Das Lied von der Erde in 1909, in the shadow of his daughter's death and a diagnosis that had given his own heart a deadline. He never heard it performed; the premiere came in 1911, six months after he died. On 23 October the State Orchestra of Athens brings this hour-long symphony for two voices to the Christos Lambrakis Hall, under conductor Duncan Warde, with mezzo-soprano Myra Teret Carmack and tenor Nathan Bowles trading the six movements between them.

The texts are German paraphrases of Tang-dynasty Chinese poems — drinking songs, autumn loneliness, youth, beauty, and a long final leave-taking. Mahler scores them so the orchestra is never merely accompaniment: a solo woodwind answers the tenor, a mandolin flickers under the mezzo's line, and the closing movement, "Der Abschied," runs nearly as long as the other five combined before dissolving on the word ewig — "eternally" — repeated until it fades to nothing.

The State Orchestra of Athens is the Megaron's orchestra in residence, and its subscription audience treats a night like this as the reason the hall exists: a crowd that arrives early, reads the poems in the programme before the lights drop, and holds its applause through the silence Mahler writes into the final bars. This is not a night for latecomers, and Das Lied plays without an interval.

Two voices, but they rarely meet. The tenor gets the extroverted movements — wine, defiance, an ape howling on the graves — while the mezzo carries the introspection, and Carmack's three movements deepen toward the forty-minute farewell that is the work's real centre of gravity. Warde conducts an orchestra that has to play chamber-quiet for long stretches, exposing every entry.

If you want a symphony that fills the hall with brass and resolves in a blaze, this is the opposite: an orchestra playing at the threshold of audibility, a text about letting go, and an ending that withholds the final chord you keep waiting for. But if you want to hear one of the pieces music students are still taught to call the end of Romanticism — sung live, in a hall built for exactly this balance of voice and orchestra — the State Orchestra has programmed it whole.

The Megaron sits on Vasilissis Sofias, and the Megaro Moussikis metro station connects to the building through an underground passage, so you reach the doors without stepping outside. Tickets run from 10 euros, discounted, to 35. Come early enough to read the poems before the 20:30 downbeat.

Das Lied von der Erde asks for a mezzo, a tenor, and a full orchestra across a single unbroken hour — a staffing that keeps it off most seasons' calendars.