Philharmonic speaks Mahler with French accent

Mahler famously said that he put the world in his symphonies. And that may be one reason that the Mahler revival was begun in America by the most American of conductors, Leonard Bernstein. Like none before him, he reveled in the enormous range of Mahlerian expression, in epic scores in which the sweetest, sexiest waltz could turn a sharp corner and suddenly face raw, death-haunted terror. This American Mahler, a Mahler of all possibilities, became a world standard.

But it isn’t the only Mahler, and Emmanuel Krivine offered up something different and much rarer Thursday night for a Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of the Fourth Symphony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Krivine’s is French Mahler, and there have been surprisingly few major French Mahler conductors. Pierre Boulez, who is interested in Mahler as the musical revolutionary who paved the way for 20th century music, is a notable exception.

Krivine’s Frenchness is mainly in the accent. The Fourth is the shortest, the most genial and most classical of Mahler’s symphonies. But Mahler being Mahler, the score is, at 55 minutes, not exactly short, nor is it all that classical or consistently genial. And, Krivine being French, brevity, classical thought and geniality were not missing, but a little translation was necessary.

What was noticeably different was the sound. Krivine has the kind of ornamental stick technique that you might imagine would drive the orchestra crazy, but he did manage to get a pretty good imitation of the French orchestral sound. A strong nasal oboe timbre pervaded the woodwinds. The brass buzzed and snarled in that elegantly offbeat way French brass can. The strings were fuller and warmer than may be typically French. But in the second movement, where Mahler calls for the concertmaster to use a violin tuned higher than the orchestra violins, Martin Chalifour highlighted the macabre timbral effects to an almost shocking degree.

Krivine dwelt upon little. He rushed into and out of climaxes as if to get over the dispensing of unpleasantries as quickly as possible. But that breathless rushing also added the excitement. Even in the last movement, a glorified song about heavenly pleasures, Krivine seemed to be winking at Mahler’s sentimentality. He warmly accompanied the soloist, Heidi Grant Murphy, who sang with lusty charm, but rambunctiously stormed through the orchestral interludes.

In all, this performance did a good job of reminding us just how strange Mahler’s music is, no matter how familiar it has become. Under Krivine’s overactive baton, the Mahler Fourth reminded me of a hyperactive French intellectual, a deep thinker, pleasure-loving yet pessimistic -- say a Sartre espousing this and that idea while jumping into and out of bed with all who would listen.

For the first half of the program, Krivine chose another genial work, Beethoven’s First Symphony. Beethoven doesn’t do accents quite so well as Mahler, but the third movement had an engaging rhythmic verve. The Finale was amusing, with Krivine replacing the blunt humor of Beethoven’s rushing scales with a more mordant wit, his baton appearing to mimic the erratic flight of a sped-up hummingbird. I don’t know how the orchestra follows him, but it does. The playing all evening was of a high, if odd, order.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Sunday, 2:30 p.m.

Price: $14-$82

Contact: (323) 850-2000