New take on Mahler: Song collection shows tender side of symphonic giant

The song had ended, but tenor Ian Bostridge remained motionless for some time.

The conductor, Yun Han-kyul, who had led the performance, the musicians of Sejong Soloists and even the audience seemed reluctant to break the silence with applause. Only after a long pause did Bostridge slowly begin to move.

It was as if the soldier boy in the song, who had bid farewell to his fellow soldiers and the world on his way to the gallows, had never returned.

The moment came during “Mahler with Sejong Soloists and Ian Bostridge,” held Wednesday at the Seoul Arts Center’s Concert Hall. The performance was marked by an intense sense of immersion shared by both performers and audience members.

Bostridge performed Gustav Mahler’s song collection “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”) and his song cycle “Songs of a Wayfarer.” Before the vocal works, Sejong Soloists performed Mahler’s arrangement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95, “Serioso,” in the first half, followed by Schumann’s String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 41, No. 1, in the second.

Bostridge’s Mahler was far from the polished beauty often associated with classical singing. His voice sometimes cracked sharply, while his melodic lines wavered uneasily. Yet the tremors sounded less like technical limitations than a deliberate journey into the emotions of the characters he portrayed.

Leaning forward and lowering his head as he sang, Bostridge appeared to inhabit the emotions of the figures in the songs. At times, the performance felt less like a song recital than a scene from an opera.

“Analysis is simply preparation to enable me to sing more freely; interpretation is what comes alive in the music at the moment of performance," Bostridge said in a written interview ahead of the concert.

Onstage that evening was not the scholar Bostridge — who studied philosophy and history at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford — but a young man wandering after losing his love, and a soldier confronting death in wartime.

In the first half, devoted to “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” Bostridge moved between fear, despair and resignation through sharp cries in the upper register and a deep, resonant lower voice.

In “Songs of a Wayfarer,” he delicately and sensitively explored the four songs of a young man wandering between love, anger and despair after heartbreak.

Bostridge has said that “at 61, I can sing with more memories and experiences than I had in my 20s.” Perhaps for that reason, the “wayfarer” he portrayed that evening did not seem to embody the freshness of young love so much as the experience of someone who had already passed through that period and was walking back into emotions long left behind.

His voice contained both the anxiety of youth and the passage of time of someone who remembers that anxiety.

The version of “Songs of a Wayfarer” performed that evening was the arrangement by composer Colin Matthews, commissioned for Bostridge and premiered in 2017.

The chamber ensemble Sejong Soloists brought out even the finest details of Bostridge’s breathing and the subtle cracks in his voice. The principal melody of the second song, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld” (“I Went This Morning over the Field”), appears almost unchanged in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

At a time when opportunities to hear Mahler’s symphonies on Korean stages have become increasingly frequent, the concert offered another way of looking at his music — from the perspective of chamber music and song rather than the vast forces of a full orchestra.

Just as Mahler regarded his symphonies as “a world,” his songs and symphonies can be understood not as separate works but as different scenes within the same world.

The concert was the second event of the ninth Hic et Nunc! Music Festival, which opened Tuesday with Sejong Soloists as its main ensemble. “Hic et Nunc,” Latin for “here and now,” is a festival that seeks to view classical music through the context of the present day while introducing contemporary creations and innovative approaches. It will continue until Thursday.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.