San Francisco Symphony’s Mahler Series Shimmers to a Close

The great long arc of the San Francisco Symphony’s Mahler Project comes to a gentle, soft landing with Songs With Orchestra, the final CD of an unprecedented undertaking. The prevailing tenderness and intimacy of this concluding disc, which features baritone Thomas Hampson and mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in three song cycles, forms a meditative coda to a genuinely heroic effort. It is, like so many things about this feat of devotion to a single composer, an intuitively apt choice. Listeners can’t help but reflect back on this Mahler accomplishment as a whole, its expressive depth and insights, its exultations and terrors and sustained high standards. It all ends here on a shimmer.

Under the galvanizing leadership of Music Director and Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony created its own label and began recording Mahler systematically in 2001. The recordings have earned seven Grammy Awards (and nine nominations). For those who have been privileged to hear an MTT-led Mahler performance over the past decade, these handsomely made and packaged discs preserve some of the peak musical experiences of the Tilson Thomas years at Davies Symphony Hall.

Hampson gets the majority of the vocal work here. His accounts of the four Songs of a Wayfarer and five selections from Das Knaben Wunderhorn bookend Graham’s Rückert- Lieder. While there is much to admire throughout, the most memorable music, fittingly enough, comes at the end of this final Mahler Project CD.

Never do voice and orchestral musicians seem more closely, almost spiritually, aligned than they do in the concluding “Primal Light” of Wunderhorn. Over a steady yet somehow transparent ground built by the brasses and lower strings, Hampson floats a gorgeously sustained and supple vocal line. The woodwinds enter here and there like tiny forest animals, timorous but wide-eyed and fully attentive. The strings add shafts of soft, precisely angled sunlight. Hampson proceeds through it all like someone under a transforming spell, bound for the “little light that will lead the way to eternal blessed life.”

A sense of sly drama permeates “Song of the Persecuted Man in the Tower,” as Hampson shifts from the wrenching voice of a prisoner to the innocent larkiness of a young girl. “The Drummer Boy” takes on a weary fatalism, played off against a tender orchestral interlude and a wistful militarism, like that of an army in baleful retreat. As to the penultimate “Reveille,” my opening remarks about soft, gentle landings must be momentarily suspended. The singer and the orchestra conspire here in a half-crazed, near-reckless capering. Hampson’s “Tralali, Tralalei, Tralalera” sounds positively sinister.

Not everything in the Wayfarer songs comes across so persuasively. “This Morning I Walked Across the Field,” which begins with a quotation from the composer’s Symphony No. 1, lacks a measure of zest and wonderment. The deliberate tempos in “My Love’s Blue Eyes” nearly undermine the limpid major- and minor-key shuttlings. But when the brasses transfigure the dirge-heavy grief of “On My Love’s Wedding Day,” sorrow is in full sad flower.

Graham’s sure, light touch lights up the fleeting poetry of the Rückert-Lieder. The cycle opens with a murmurous “I Breathed a Gentle Fragrance.” In “If You Love Because of Beauty,” a tidelike orchestral undertow carries the singer along as if a swimmer were being swept away by her own feelings. Tilson Thomas knows just how to tint the washes of Mahler’s orchestral color in “Midnight.” In the final “I Am Lost to the World,” Graham may be singing the words, and exquisitely so. But the warm woodwinds and softly glowing strings seem to be speaking just as clearly about living “alone in my heaven, in my love, in my song.”