“Magnificent Mozart & Mahler” close out the LBSO Season

The reduced strings of the Long Beach Symphony and Music Director Eckart Preu acknowledge the applause after their performance of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

While concert hall programs are often dominated by the big “B”s of the classical repertoire—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, et al—the “M”s can muster a fair few luminaries as well, and the final concert of the Long Beach Symphony’s 2025-2026 season, as ever under the baton of its Music Director Eckart Preu, was devoted to two of the current brightest: the first a fixture of the repertoire for around a century-and-a-half (perhaps not as long as you might have imagined, given that this year marks the 270th anniversary of Mozart’s birth), and the other exhibiting an inexorable rise in popularity over much less than half that time.

Eckart Preu.

This was, of course, Gustav Mahler, and the LBSO’s current financial buoyancy (long may it continue!) enabled it to muster the largest forces I can recall ever seeing on the Terrace Theater platform, for a performance of his Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor.

I had intended to prepare for this by dusting off some CDs but life intervened, and so I came to Maestro Preu’s interpretation with virtually “innocent ears,” apart from memories of a performance by the Pacific Symphony a couple of years ago in the Segerstrom Concert Hall at Costa Mesa (reviewed here).

To start with, his pre-concert talk was an object-lesson in enthusiastic, fact-filled, and insightful comment about both work and composer, sketching in Mahler’s fraught childhood, his early maturity, his rise in fame as a conductor, and the ethical compromises he made to help secure his appointments as artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper) in 1897 and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1898.

Mahler's composing hut in Maiernigg,
near Maria Wörth in Carinthia, Austria,
where he wrote the Fifth Symphony.

As for the Fifth Symphony itself, written in the summers of 1901 and 1902 between Mahler's torrentially busy conducting and administrative duties, Preu emphasized its overall darkness-to-light progression, which may be seen against the background of his rapid rise to pre-eminence in Vienna’s musical culture, a traumatic near-death experience in February 1901, and his affair with and then marriage to the charismatic Alma Schindler in March 1902.

Mahler never approached symphonic structure twice in the same way, and though Symphonies 1, 4, 6, and 9 do adopt the classic four-movement pattern, each is so vastly different in expressive content from the others as to render that commonality irrelevant. Like Symphonies 2, 7, and 10, No. 5 has five movements, but in it, uniquely, Mahler grouped them into three parts: 1 (I+II), 2 (III), and 3 (IV+V).

The Fifth can be felt to conform to the four-movement “standard” if movements I and II are heard as a unity, with movement I, headed Trauermarsch (Funeral March), acting as a huge exposition and its successor an equally massive development, and the way Preu began his clearly thought-through conception of the whole work lent weight to this.

Miles McAllister.

After waiting and—with typical consideration—allowing principal trumpet Miles McAllister to take his own time before embarking on the cruelly exposed, and crucial, 13-measure solo that opens the symphony (in which he meticulously observed the plethora of expressive cues that Mahler spatters through what is surely a call-back—short-short-short-long—to the start of the most famous Fifth Symphony of them all!), the first movement proceeded just as Mahler conceived and marked it—not dragging, but truly In gemessenem Schritt, Streng wie ein Kondukt (with measured step, solemn as a funeral procession).

After this, to my ears, ideally paced and equally finely played account of the first movement, Preu underlined the unity between it and the second by embarking on the latter with barely a breath pause, though Mahler does not mark it attacca. Also, while lacking none of the storminess and vehemence that Mahler requests, his initial tempo, more measured than some conductors in this work, made its opening less of an abrupt shock and more of a natural reaction to the ground-down, exhausted conclusion of the Funeral March.

More thematically and expressively diverse than the first movement, the second can seem to lose its way in a less well-controlled and articulated performance than this, in which the most eloquent passage of all was the long unison soliloquy starting at measure 189 by the cellos alone under a pianissimo timpani roll, Langsam aber immer ((slowly but surely), played with total unanimity by the 10-strong section, led by principal Cécilia Tsan, to profoundly moving effect.

Gustav Mahler in 1902: pencil sketch by Emil Orik.

At the end of movement II Mahler does build in an interpretative pitfall. Its stormy, digressive progress eventually rises to a summit-like brass chorale that prefigures the final triumph that ends the whole work, but to draw out this chorale too much is a mistake.

There has to be a sense of something being kept in reserve, and this Preu finely achieved, so that its collapse into the monstrous chord that destroys all hope of resolution at this stage of the symphony felt exactly right (only a fanatic like me could regret that the tam-tam’s fff smash here—its only such marking in the whole piece—did not obliterate the rest of the otherwise perfectly balanced orchestra, all also fff!).

In a typical (if there be such a thing) four-movement symphony, the middle tends to be occupied by a slow movement and a much shorter scherzo, but in Mahler’s Fifth these proportions are reversed, so that what follows the shattered end of the second movement (still with that Beethovenian short-short-short-long muttering into extinction) is the largest and most complex scherzo in the symphonic repertoire—Part 2 in Mahler’s tripartite scheme—running to 819 measures and lasting around 19 minutes in this performance.

Alma Schindler in 1895, aged 16.

Mahler specifically requests a long pause before this entirely different music begins, with a bright flourish on four horns and then a horn solo leading into the first Ländler subject. He wrote in a letter to Alma: “The Scherzo is—the very devil… Conductors for the next fifty years will take it too fast and make nonsense of it—” and Maestro Preu avoided that with tempi more spacious than many performances and the LBSO responding with playing that was affectionate and easeful, but still alert and responsive.

However, this is arguably one of the most difficult movements in all of Mahler for interpreters to make dovetail and cohere, with a kaleidoscopic range of mood, texture, pace, and dynamic, and in a few places I felt juxtapositions didn’t quite work with the sense of inevitability and through line that they needed. Against that, though, there were many passages to be relished for the sheer élan of the LBSO’s playing collectively and individually, the standout being principal Melia Badalian’s magisterial handling of the long, rapturous horn solo, melancholic and challenging by turns, into which the tumultuous first half of the Scherzo devolves and out of which the movement’s increasingly buoyant latter part grows until its eruptive, headlong end.

Melia Badalian.

The other element in that reversal of middle-movement proportions is of course, the Adagietto, made famous by Visconti’s use of it on the sound-track of Death in Venice. Mahler does mark it Sehr langsam (very slow) and many modern recordings follow this literally, so that it plays for 12-13 minutes, or even longer. However, though sadly no recordings of Mahler conducting exist, in 1905 he did make four piano rolls, including the finale and Trauermarsch of Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 respectively, and in all of them his tempi are crisp and faster than most modern recordings.

Willem Mengelberg.

Also, his close friend, the conductor Willem Mengelberg, used scores annotated with tempo indications provided by Mahler himself, and his 1926 recording of the Adagietto clocks in at well under eight minutes. In this performance by the LBSO, thankfully, Preu adopted a similar approach, and made the Adagietto—confirmed by Mengelberg to have been a love song to Alma— the gentle, flowing interlude that Mahler surely intended, aided by translucent playing from the LBSO strings, with Marcia Dickstein’s harp an equal partner in eloquence.

Marcia Dickstein.

Though neither as long nor as copiously scored as several other Mahler symphonies, the Fifth is as challenging to interpret and exhausting to play as any—and now after nearly an hour of orchestral turmoil, leavened for the wind, brass and percussion only by the Adagietto, he crowns the whole edifice with a 16-minute finale as complex, diverse, and virtuosically scored as anything that has gone before, but which nonetheless seemed to daunt neither conductor nor orchestra.

Mahler’s wide range of episodes includes several passages of complex fugal writing that were delivered with exemplary rhythmic clarity by the strings. Though, as ever for this listener, it felt as if there’s one too many false dawns as the finale approaches its climax, the whole orchestra surged through the great, conclusive-at-last, chorale and race to the finish with no sign of fatigue, earning a cheering standing ovation and several returns to the podium by Maestro Preu.

Mozart in 1789.

His choice of concert opener had been Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (1787), its origins as mysterious, as the program noted, as its familiarity is universal. This was a very sensible selection, not only because of that familiarity but also, being scored for strings only, it left the remainder of the orchestra fresh for their herculean task to come. Elegant, rhythmically pointed, and with inner parts always sounding alive and expressive, the reduced LBSO 8-6-6-4-3 strings gave a clear harbinger of what their full forces, at 14-12-10-10-8, would achieve in the Mahler.

However, before he set the Fifth Symphony in motion, Eckart Preu acknowledged the long service of LBSO members, calling for those with progressively more years to remain standing. No fewer than eight had been with the orchestra upwards of 45 years—Ann Brenton, Craig Gibson, Andy Honea, Leslie Lashinsky, Linda Stone, Jacqueline Suzuki, and Alvin Veeh— with a further three (Diane Alancraig, Marcia Dickstein, and Cynthia Moussas) clocking in at over 40.

But in truth, every one of the 90 players deserves a shout-out for the skill and commitment with which they executed this most demanding of symphonies. Long Beach has something treasurable in the partnership of its orchestra with their Music Director—long may it continue!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 6, 2026, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: David de Santiago; Mahler, composing hut, Mozart: Wikimedia Commons; Miles McAllister, Melia Badalian, Marcia Dickstein: Long Beach Symphony; Alma Schindler: Mahler Foundation.

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