Forget Lollapalooza and all the rest. The hottest festival ticket happens just once a generation, if not once a lifetime.
That would be the Mahler Festival, a musical G20 summit of sorts celebrating the life and legacy of Gustav Mahler. From May 8 to 18, orchestras from around the world will convene in Amsterdam to perform the composer and conductor’s complete orchestral works, marathon-style.
This year’s Mahler Festival is notable for two reasons. First off, it’s just the third in history: The festival was founded in 1920, and its last iteration was in 1995. Second, an orchestra from the Americas has never been invited to participate until this year — a distinction reserved for our very own Chicago Symphony.
“It has been sold out already for one year,” conductor Jaap van Zweden says of the CSO’s festival appearances. “Everybody is really excited, of course, for the festival itself. But also, having the Chicago Symphony there is a huge honor for us.”
With its music-director-to-be, Klaus Mäkelä, already booked to lead Amsterdam’s own Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the CSO will play Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies with van Zweden. The Dutch conductor already led an explosive Mahler 6 with the Chicagoans in 2022; he reprises it at Symphony Center May 8 and 9. Before that, he gives a preview of the Seventh for local audiences from April 17 to 19.
“The best thing would be playing (the symphonies) on a single night: 6, then 7 after intermission,” van Zweden says. “That’s impossible, of course” — that would be nearly three hours of music — “but 6 and 7 are so related.”
Both symphonies contain some of Mahler’s darkest and most uncompromising music. His Sixth Symphony, sometimes nicknamed the “Tragic,” is, in van Zweden’s words, “devastating.” The Seventh, written just after it, seesaws between the “demonic” and hopeful.
“(Mahler) is coming out of the woods. It’s like there is still life after this symphony,” van Zweden says.
Even at personal and professional high points, Mahler’s life was full of inner turmoil. He fretted over his tempestuous marriage, over his conducting responsibilities sapping the little free time he had to compose, and over relentless antisemitic barbs in the Viennese press, despite having converted to Catholicism to improve his professional prospects. His music is often haunted by death — premonitions that, in his case, proved correct. Mahler died in 1911 from illnesses exacerbated by a heart condition, at just 50.
“Although it’s very tragic, thank god it all happened to him. Without these very deep life experiences, Mahler would not have made this incredible music,” van Zweden says.
Van Zweden’s own connections to Amsterdam, and the festival, are multifold. An accomplished violinist, he was born and raised in the city. He left to study at Juilliard, only to be promptly tugged home: Bernard Haitink — at the time the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal conductor, and later taking the same role at the CSO — invited van Zweden to become the prestigious orchestra’s concertmaster at just 19. Van Zweden would play in the orchestra until 1995, when he began conducting in earnest. One of his last major undertakings as concertmaster was, in fact, playing that 1995 Mahler Fest.
“I think it helps tremendously that I’ve played all the Mahler symphonies, both on the podium and as a player,” he says. “He doesn’t give you the feeling of power, but it is a very powerful feeling. Those are completely different things. You are part of something very big and very emotional.”
Van Zweden has spent a good chunk of his career in the U.S., most recently as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He shares that résumé line with both Mahler himself and Mahler Festival founder Willem Mengelberg, one of the only conductors to champion Mahler’s music while the composer was still alive. Before his stint in New York, Mengelberg became the youngest chief conductor of the city’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1895, when he was appointed at 24. (That will make Mäkelä the second youngest when he takes the reins of the Concertgebouw in 2027, the same year he assumes leadership of the CSO.)
The festival invited van Zweden for his long history with the Concertgebouw and Amsterdam generally: One of the Mahler symphonies he played at the 1995 festival was, in fact, the Sixth. From there, the festival specifically requested he appear with the CSO — a testament to the orchestra’s “incredible history” with Mahler. The orchestra became the first in the U.S. to play the Seventh Symphony in 1921, shortly after then-CSO music director Frederick Stock heard it at the very first Mahler Festival.
The CSO would become especially associated with Mahler under the leadership of Sir Georg Solti, whose pummeling, precise recordings of the composer’s complete symphonies won multiple Grammys. Through memorable performances, recordings and tours, Haitink and principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez also asserted the orchestra’s identity as world-class Mahlerians.
“It’s not for nothing that the Concertgebouw asked me to bring the Chicago Symphony with me,” van Zweden says. “(The orchestra is) legendary for its Mahler playing.”
Leading the orchestra in a setting as august as this, Van Zweden is looking forward to building on that history. But he stresses that these symphonies are anything but museum pieces.
“I remember coming to New York and doing a Mahler symphony with (specific) bowings. They said, ‘Well, this is the tradition of Bernstein.’ I thought, how interesting — because when Bernstein was in Amsterdam, he did a different bowing,” he says.
“So, what is tradition? All the different conductors who are coming will bring their own tradition, their own life, their own experience to the orchestra. Tradition is always something that needs to be alive.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
“Mahler 7 with Jaap van Zweden” is April 17-19, tickets $49-$299. “Mahler 6 with Jaap van Zweden” is May 8-9, tickets $49-$375. Both are at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; ticketing and more information at cso.org
