United States Golijov, Mahler: Camilla Tilling (soprano), Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra / David Danzmayr (conductor). Southern Theater, Columbus, 18.1.2026. (MSJ)
Golijov – Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Mahler – Symphony No.4 in G (arr. Yoon Jae Lee)
*(s)Mahler: noun, epic Mahler reduced to chamber orchestra dimensions
Forgive the joke, for Yoon Jae Lee’s ongoing project to arrange Mahler’s epic symphonies for chamber orchestra has a serious intent: to make this music available to smaller ensembles, particularly in places that may not have the resources to stage Mahler as written. Lee is currently halfway through the cycle, working on the Sixth Symphony. The Fourth was the place where he began this project a decade ago, and it is easy to see why he started here. The Fourth is Mahler’s most intimately-scaled symphony, despite a couple of big climaxes. It is also the piece where the composer toyed most with Neoclassical ideas, the first movement sounding like a couple of Haydn and Mozart symphonic first movements chopped up, recombined and stitched together with a bit of expressionist angst. The reduced forces in this arrangement help clarify the layers of activity throughout the orchestra without greatly detracting from its expressive impact.
Conductor David Danzmayr’s approach to the first movement of the Mahler emphasized that collage effect, perhaps too much so. If the question was, ‘What tempo will you take for the first movement?’, Danzmayr’s answer would seem to be, ‘All of them!’ The sleigh-bell introduction was moderate, the first theme was brisk and the second theme was quite slow. All the transitional sections had their own paces, and a quick consult of Mahler’s original score proves that this matrix of tempo relationships is indeed what Mahler calls for, though perhaps Danzmayr emphasized the differences more than the similarities among the tempos. Nonetheless, kudos to the conductor for pointing out Mahler’s modernism. The reduced forces weren’t a problem except that it felt like the trumpets were being held back, not cutting through the textures at the peak of the movement.
The second movement was outstanding, with concertmaster Katharine McLin leaning into the eerie solos played on a standby retuned violin as Mahler requests, giving the solos a supernatural chill. The slightly reduced string forces – and the excellent acoustics of the Southern Theater – helped the solo violin stand out more than usual. The winds brought the folkloric trio to colorful life. The slow movement progressed patiently, lacking only the last degree of heft at the heaven-opening climax of the movement (and symphony). It sounded like the arrangement added the bass drum to the timpani notes at the climax, which doesn’t make up the difference in orchestral heft, it just warps it in a distracting way which is really the only moment of the arrangement that stood out as an obvious compromise.
The finale was lovely, with Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling floating her notes sweetly over the orchestra. She fully grasped the conceit of the text – it is a child’s view of heaven – and launched into the descriptive passages portraying feasts of plenty with enthusiastic, wide-eyed wonder that came through charmingly in the notes. As the music dissolved in bliss at the end, the performers held still for an extended time before letting the spell break into a hearty ovation.
The peak of the evening, though, was the performance of Argentine composer Oswaldo Golijov’s Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, heard in the first half of the concert. It started arrestingly with Tilling singing unaccompanied in the lullaby, ‘Night of the Flying horses,’ before the strings joined with dramatic underpinning. This movement, originally written for the film The Man Who Cried, combines Jewish, Romani and South American elements in a breathtaking succession of dramatic moments.
In the second song, ‘Lúa descolorida’, the strings cushioned the ecstatic soprano line that sweetly unfurled over them. The set closed with ‘How Slow the Wind’, a combination of two short poems by Emily Dickinson. For most of the song, the soprano arched slowly over the roiling textures beneath her voice, before being drawn into the turmoil near the end. Tilling used the acoustics of the hall to float her voice intimately, never having to force her tone to sound out, and brought a sense of total commitment to the moody songs. Absolutely riveting.
Mark Sebastian Jordan