Performing Arts

Michael Shih and Edward Jones represent the top and bottom of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra: Mr. Shih as concertmaster (first violin), Mr. Jones as principal (and usually only) tuba. Principal percussionist Preston Thomas is the noisemaker.

This week, Mr. Shih and Mr. Jones are framing a very large orchestra, as an enlarged FWSO tackles Gustav Mahler's Sixth, Seventh and Second symphonies, in that order, on three succeeding evenings. Led by music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the preseason festival is the second installment in a three-year survey of all nine of Mahler's completed symphonies.

A prefatory Thursday evening program with speaker Carol Reynolds, mezzo Jill Grove and pianist Brian Connelly will explore Mahler and his milieu with art songs by Mahler, his wife Alma, Schumann, Brahms and Strauss. For the Second Symphony, on Sunday, the orchestra will be joined by soprano Jessica Rivera, mezzo Susanne Mentzer and the Southwestern Seminary Master Chorale (David Thye, director).

Concertmaster and violinist Michael Shih says Mahler has 'us basically playing all over the fingerboard.'

The instrumental forces required for the Second Symphony are truly heroic, including parts for 10 horns, eight to 10 trumpets, an organ (necessarily electronic in Fort Worth's Bass Performance Hall) and lots of extra winds. Throughout the three concerts, Mr. Thomas and his percussive colleagues will tackle parts for small and large gongs (tam-tams), cowbells and church bells, sticks slapped against drum rims, and the Sixth Symphony's famous hammer blows.

Huge orchestras – plus voices in the Second, Third, Fourth and Eighth symphonies – were natural expressions for the turn-of-the-20th-century Austrian composer, who saw his symphonies as "entire worlds." Both sonically and emotionally, they whip up chills-down-the-back climaxes, plumb depths of despair, dig up nightmarish grotesqueries, and luxuriate in oases of amazing beauty.

'It reminds me of a box for a subwoofer, with a kind of horn flare,' says principal percussionist Preston Thomas. The box is hit with a sledgehammer in the Sixth Symphony.

"It's beautiful music, and exciting music," Mr. Shih says. "Everything is about contrast, extremes, from the smallest to the largest.

"Sometimes the music is very sad, very melancholy, and you can't help being moved by it. And of course there are the sheer forces, the numbers of musicians onstage. When the offstage brass musicians come onstage at the end of the Second Symphony, the sheer sound is just hair-raising."

For orchestra musicians, one challenge in Mahler symphonies is simply maintaining concentration, and intensity, in works that can last an hour and a half. And those expressive extremes pose challenges all their own.

"For the violins, he has us basically playing all over the fingerboard," Mr. Shih says, "from the lowest notes to the highest reaches of the instruments.

"The fast passages, of course, are virtuosic writing for the instrument. But the slow movements take so long to develop, and the challenge is just keeping the sound and the music moving."

For brass players, Mr. Jones cites the challenge of "just the extremes we have to produce in terms of dynamics.

"In the case of the trumpet players, some of the parts are quite high and quite loud. Sometimes we have to play very loud and quite soft in the same phrase."

Mr. Jones, who plays contrabass tuba, won't be delivering the most famous Mahler tuba solo of all, the one that opens the Seventh Symphony. For that, the orchestra is importing Brian Bowman, professor of euphonium at the University of North Texas.

"In the Mahler score, it says 'tenor horn,' " Mr. Jones explains, "but it's usually played on tenor tuba, or euphonium. The tenor tuba of Mahler's time was actually a smaller-bore instrument than what we use today.

"It's a completely separate part, and there are places where the contrabass and the tenor tuba are playing at the same time, so both parts cannot be played by the same person."

The Mahler symphonies pose special challenges for percussionists, too.

"Really, the thing we've been stressing about the most is obtaining the instruments we don't own," says Mr. Thomas.

"Part of the problem is what Mahler called Almglocken – cowbells. Here we are in Cowtown, and we're playing cowbells. We've gone out and searched and rented and borrowed some bells. We've got some both onstage and offstage, as he calls for."

In addition to the cowbells, used in both the Sixth and Seventh symphonies to suggest bucolic atmospheres, the Second and Sixth symphonies call for Glocken, deeper church bells.

"The only church bells we've been able to find belong to the Dallas Symphony," Mr. Thomas says, "and were made for the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. We've also located bell plates, tuned like church bells. " Mahler does not specify pitch – or rhythm, for that matter.

"When we last played the Symphony No. 2, the management didn't want to spend the extra money on rental of bells. It's expensive, and the orchestra is huge, so we just used regular tubular chimes. It's faking, but it's all we could do at the time."

Then there are the hammer blows in the Sixth Symphony. Mahler imagined the sound of an ax, although he was never entirely satisfied with different efforts to produce the sound in concerts.

In her memoirs, Alma Mahler explained the blows' significance. "It is the hero," she wrote, "on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled." On second thought, Mahler cut back the blows from three to two.

"The problem is, what do you hit?" Mr. Thomas says.

"I researched for months, and my colleagues helped me, too, and the Percussive Arts Society. We found some diagrams from a major orchestra, and we had one of the stagehands who is an excellent carpenter build a box to those specifications.

"It reminds me of a box for a subwoofer, with a kind of horn flare. We're using a sledgehammer to hit it, and it's a pretty powerful sound."

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra Mahler Festival. All programs at 7:30 p.m. at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth.

•Thursday: "The Man Behind the Music," with speaker Carol Reynolds, mezzo Susanne Mentzer, pianist Brian Connelly.

•Friday: Symphony No. 6.

•Saturday: Symphony No. 7.

•Sunday: Symphony No. 2, Resurrection.

Four-concert subscriptions $29 to $129. Single tickets $15 to $49. 817-665-6000, www.fwsymphony.org.

Symphony No. 2, Resurrection

•London Symphony Orchestra, Kaplan (Conifer Classics, two CDs). Gilbert Kaplan, the multimillionaire founder of Institutional Investor magazine, was so obsessed with Mahler's Second Symphony that he took conducting lessons, hired an orchestra and conducted the piece at New York's Avery Fisher Hall. Five years later he made this recording, which lacks the personality of some performances but is thoughtfully laid out and reflects intense study of what's known of Mahler's own performances. Superb sonics. (Mr. Kaplan's subsequent DG recording with the Vienna Philharmonic is less fresh.)

•Philharmonia Orchestra, Klemperer (EMI Classics). Otto Klemperer actually knew Mahler, and apart from a so-so mezzo soloist, this 1963 recording is gripping start to finish. Sonics OK.

Symphony No. 6

•Vienna Philharmonic, Bernstein (DG, two CDs). Leonard Bernstein's penchant for excess could overwhelm even Mahler, but this 1988 performance is a classic. The slow movement is sublime.

•Philadelphia Orchestra, Eschenbach (Ondine, two hybrid SACDs). Christoph Eschenbach is another conductor sometimes given to self-indulgence, especially in slow tempos, but his Mahler Sixth, which may have been inspired by Bernstein's, is compelling.

Symphony No. 7

•Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Abbado (EuroArts DVD). This quirkiest of Mahler symphonies gets a wonderfully life-affirming performance from Claudio Abbado and his festival orchestra, combining star players from major European orchestras and hotshot twentysomethings.

•San Francisco Symphony, Tilson Thomas (San Francisco Symphony, hybrid SACD). Michael Tilson Thomas' Mahler cycle, now nearing completion, has been a mix of hits and misses, but this intensely focused account is one of the prizes.

Scott Cantrell