Review: The Sound of Mahler’s Second Dazzles in New Jacobs Music Center

After four years of waiting, the Copley Symphony Hall has been remade to enhance the San Diego Symphony sound, its musicians, and their audience response as the Jacobs Music Center. Vacated by COVID and judged acoustically repairable, the venue placed its uneven tone and barnlike feel in the hands of musically-minded engineers.

I remember many concerts at Copley: It wasn’t that bad — nothing like the unwelcome Mandeville at UCSD or the cavernous sepulture of the Civic Center where any theatrical intimacy of, say, a Broadway show, expires about row 12, the balcony patrons listening in from another county. The symphony board agreed. Copley could be overhauled — what with $125 million and computer-driven and ear-tested redesigns.

Fittingly, conductor Rafael Payare, after a donor-showcase first night, Sept. 28, chose Gustav Mahler’s colossus, the “Resurrection” Symphony, his Second, this past weekend to christen its equally colossal retrofit.

All Mahler symphonies are conquests, but the Second is continent-spanning in size, verve, and spiritual hutzpah. Scored for contralto and soprano, organ, choir, and very large orchestra, the work runs to 85 minutes, depending on the interpreter. It’s an heir to the gargantuan symphonic statement, first vulcanized with Beethoven’s Ninth, 70 years prior. Indeed, the hands-down successor to the mountaintop deliverance of “rebirth” in music — or as music — is this epic, written between 1888 and 1894, with its first performance in Berlin, December, 1894, and paid for out of Mahler’s own pocket.

Mahler finished 9 of 10 symphonies; the first three had programs detailing human sagas from darkness to light. Later, he dropped such references, which, for me, confirms music’s easeful obliteration of a linguistic cousin. Still, because Mahler set a God-summoning poem for vocalists in the finale, the Second is vauntingly “religious,” the force of its “hero” undergoing a soul torn asunder and his (or her) transformation back to the living, whether in this life or the next.

In the first of five movements, Mahler writes a “funeral ceremony” (his term) for the “Titan” figure who, buried and honored in the First Symphony, now reappears, angry at being stirred back into battle, for the Second. The movement hurries along, by turns neurotic and romantic, martial grudges giving way to lyrical flights, C-minor grave, Eb-major buoyant.

Afoot in the second movement, the hero recalls his youth—jaunty, cloudless, mournful sonorities in a landler or three-step meter; a third section loosens his brooding with a rousing scherzo (some jokes land, others don’t) in time for the fourth movement’s brief annunciation. Here, a contralto voices the hero’s desired ascension, based on a folk poem, “Ulricht”: “Dear God will grant me a small light, / Will light my way to eternal, blissful life.”

But—look out!—an hour of music has raised the stakes for the “Resurrection” finale and its unraveling the composer’s “terrifying questions” about life. In it, the music wanders, delicate restraint and quick-fused outbursts, anguished motifs climbing and raggedly falling until, like a boulder dropped in a pond, the long and laboring strum und drang explodes and settles.

Contralto and soprano with choir chorales and off-stage fanfares tell, in Mahler’s own verse, of the death of Sorrow and the demise of Mortality, readying the hero to arise from the dead. All told in earthshaking triple fortissimos, our ghostly guide finally reaches his ideal—the Door to Eternal Life, a.k.a. God—where the soul is reunited with its resurrected body in Heaven. The alpine Übermensch pinnacles, and so, nearly an hour and a half, do we listeners, exhausted.

It’s important to note that Mahler, a Jew, converted to Catholicism in 1897, the year before he finished his Second Symphony. As a sonic analogue, the work for some represents a religious conversion. There’s no proof of this in Mahler’s letters, but then such programmatic allusions made the symphonic form behave like a literary narrative or with poetic urgency. And yet once Mahler discovered how he himself could revivify his audience symphonically, he was happy to let the music stand alone.

Today, we hear little of music’s otherness; our secular ears are animated by the corporeal power of sound, pleasure its raison d’être. Proof of our existential need were the “funds necessary” to redo the symphony’s acoustic environ. Around 2021, Copley Hall expired, was hollowed out, bottom-buttressed with tons of concrete, and reshaped as a tunable sonority, the Jacobs.

Acousticians define halls grand enough to be “symphonic” in space — sound-specific venues aligned with the rise of large orchestras — as “listening envelopes.” In the 1840s, Vienna concert halls were rectangular shoeboxes, 75 feet wide, built for 2,000 well-to-do patrons. Wood flooring and cushioned seats set beneath reflective curved ceilings and irregularly-placed statuary and niches, these halls after 150 years of performances are still the ne plus ultra of symphonic temples.

The new Jacobs has its own turn on the sacred halls of the past. Its curving, wide sides remain, hung with metal-mesh drapes over air pockets, while the circus-top ceiling and Baroque ornamentation still flaunt like a dining room at Versailles. The palatial detail commands much visual splash: Looking good, however, is far less important than sounding good. The back under-the-balcony wall (my seat) has been brought forward, and the stage is much deeper than the Copley, a choir terrace lofting behind. (When the black-clad Festival Chorus entered and sat, they resembled an 80-member court of Supreme Court judges.)

The major additions are 20 ceiling-hung reflector panels, directly above the players, tippable to tune the “acoustic canopy.” An engineer told me that the players have had them adjusted to their sectional ears for weeks prior. With Mahler, very loud and very soft textures are tough to aggregate. Any given delivery may sound too boisterous and overly grand or too dry and without echo but, in concert, the mix should act as a proving ground for the hall’s reverberant potential.

Sunday’s performance not only tone-tested the Jacobs Music Center with Mahler’s extreme range of sonorities but also revealed another factor — how sound travels among the 82-piece orchestra (enlarged for the Second) and conductor Payare, now in his sixth season. Conductors are no longer kings like the dictatorial Von Karajan or the enraptured Bernstein in the 1960s; the good ones merge with their players and become, via an aural osmosis, one wired body.

Payare — of the spring-loaded, wiry tilt, the knee-folding bends and the arms-aloft leaps — conducts with neither sentimentality nor hesitation; rather, he’s sure of the direction, at times, obsessionally so, and the orchestra, neither following nor leading, vibrates on his wavelength and sparks to his electricity.

Payare’s motoric almost rapacious drive seems tailor-made for Mahler’s Second. From the get-go I was aware of his energizing Mahler’s often-manic material — now riling things up, rushing toward an outburst or two, then, tenderly settling down the theatrics, then, varying and repeating this hill-and-valley expedition until — and for — the explosively born-again ending.

In the ever-surging first movement, the orchestra states its ominous theme and returns to it three more times in its twenty-one minutes. Wonderful how each restart/voicing sounded differently as Payare, the lion-tamer, whipped the sections up. This push-rush-relax motion is scored throughout the symphony, lending it a steady wobble. But sound drama is not like a Shakespearean tragedy; instead, it’s made of musical tensions and resolutions among the orchestral parts. The third movement features Mahler’s scherzo play — a kind of nighttime ride of whirling ghosts and clanging tuttis, which the excited ensemble chased like a posse hunting the woods for a fugitive.

In the fourth movement, I was cooled by the declamatory grace of Anna Larsson, the contralto, on the “Ulricht” or song of Primal Light. Its major/minor mood swings rerouted the symphony from instrumental pastiche to a tone poem with commentary — the human ideal, a resurrection in or after life to a purposeful, rewarding faith. Larsson’s projection of that abstract idea solemnized the hubbub of the previous movements.

Two mighty chorales followed: one in the brass and one in the chorus, singing first very softly, then forcefully in the climax. Despite battle-like “off-stage” peals from horns and trumpets positioned in the balcony, the symphony refused to let go of its self-consciousness, all a gathering storm for the final crescendo. At one point contrabass tuba, trombones, and double basses rattled the floor underneath — the true test of any venue: Can the orchestra quake its foundation? You betcha!

As for the hall, with seats for a chummy 1,823, I heard the new acoustical space sing. It enveloped and clarified the orchestra’s pressure-packed dynamics, sectional contours, and moody slowdowns. Several sources spoke of how well the musicians can hear one another now when, Copley-held, they couldn’t. Taken together, the whole organism of sound and space “knows” how loud and how soft it should be.

Is this an orchestra’s thoroughbred response to the new space? An ensemble’s comfort with its conductor? A finessed conversation among players because of those rightly tilted panels on the ceiling? All of it, I’d wager.

I had a couple qualms. Using the old European string separation — from left to right: double basses, violin I, cello, viola, violin II — the ensemble exchanges were fresh and spirited. With the basses on a four-foot riser, their aggression, per the opening, was menacingly beautiful. However, the celli stuck in the middle were overwhelmed by their neighbors; they needed four more players, at least, to have an equal say. The brass section was, as is typical with intemperate metal and valves, unsteady in the beginning but did synchronize their lyrical parts and martial attacks eventually. The winds and their many solo obbligati were shiveringly good.

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s “Time: Three Movements for Orchestra” opened the program with a wild fantasy of spectral sounds in extreme registers, percolated by a sizable percussion battery and outlined with melodies “borrowed” from Brahms and Mahler himself. “Time” feels both hyper-structured and free, brilliantly so — its herky-jerky motifs and shifting meters reminded me of the top-spinning orchestral pieces of Arnold Schoenberg. Larcher’s should gain a foothold in the contemporary repertoire.

Thomas Larson is a San Diego-based freelance writer. His website archives nearly 400 of his publications over the past 30 years.