How Gustavo Dudamel’s Mahler festival grooves for young and old

Some months before beginning his six-week Mahler Project in 2012, a 30-year-old Gustavo Dudamel said he was studying like crazy.

Just before the first concert on Jan. 13 that year, he said, “It’s crazy,” the craziness being that he was about to attempt something beyond reason: performing all nine completed Mahler symphonies and the first movement of the 10th with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela over three weeks in L.A. and then immediately repeating it in Caracas.

Asked how he felt at the end, a near-delirious Dudamel could barely blurt out, “Craaaazzzy.”

The Mahler Project may have been crazy-making, but it was not without a certain only-in-L.A. precedence and panache. For more than three decades — beginning at a time when live performances of these symphonies, each a psychical experience, were not commonplace — the local Mahler Society held annual “Mahlerthons.” From 8 a.m. to midnight, recordings of everything Mahler were played. You also could pick up a gray Mahler sweatshirt and a “Mahler Grooves” bumper sticker.

With sublime craziness, Dudamel has been in the midst of another Mahler project with the L.A. Phil in Walt Disney Concert Hall that ended Sunday. “Mahler Grooves” may not be as crazy-making for Dudamel, who leads only two complete symphonies, the Fifth and the Seventh. But neither this now-44-year-old mature Mahlerian nor the L.A. Phil have lost their audacity. While the Oscars went on for nearly four hours, a 10-hour Mahlerthon, the first anywhere ever, took place at Disney Hall.

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Six local student orchestras — high schoolers along with college and conservatory musicians — performed movements from Symphonies Nos. 1, 3 and 4. The Second and Sixth were played complete. Hardly kids’ stuff, these symphonies provide some of the greatest musical and emotional challenges for even the greatest professional orchestras. But a week ago, with astonishing enthusiasm and unbounded expertise, more than 500 young people from all over L.A. devoted themselves to finding, from Mahler’s example, the meaning of life.

The day began with the L.A. Phil’s YOLA, 150 young musicians strong, playing the last movement of Mahler’s First under Alan Mautner. A snafu with digital tickets kept me from reaching my seat in time, so I ended up hearing the performance in the hall’s upstairs listening room, where the sound is vibrantly funneled directly up from the stage but where you can’t see the orchestra. No matter, the exhilaration was contagious.

The Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, conducted by Charles Dickerson III, took on the huge assignment of the first and last movements from Mahler’s Third, his longest symphony. This large ensemble of teens tackled Mahler’s search for peace and commonality among the chaos and beauty of nature and our own emotional chaos, with inspirational tenacity.

Santa Monica High School’s Chamber Orchestra brought a lovely, lyric sheen to Mahler’s string orchestra arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. The school’s Symphony Orchestra next turned to the first movement of Mahler’s Fourth. So suavely sophisticated was the performance led by Jason Aiello, I had to blink a few times to remind myself these were high school students.

In the evening, Neal Stulberg led an intense, brilliant, riveting performance of Mahler’s most agitated symphony, the 80-minute Sixth (known as the “Tragic”). Later, the Colburn Orchestra ended the long day with a blazing performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” conducted with flare by Earl Lee. Madison Leonard and Kayleigh Decker were the two moving vocal soloists, while members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale provided a blazing ending.

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It so happened that while half the Master Chorale was ringing the rafters of one of the world’s greatest concert halls, resurrecting Mahler’s message of hope for a new generation, the other half of the chorus was stuck in one of the world’s most dismal acoustical auditoriums giving mournful solace to the Oscars for its “In Memoriam” segment in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.

There is more significance to this than meets the ear. L.A., and Hollywood in particular, boast a unique Mahler heritage. It may be well known that many German émigrés to L.A. were closely associated with Mahler. They included conductors (Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter), composers (notably Arnold Schoenberg) and writers (Thomas Mann), as well as Mahler’s widow, composer Alma Mahler, and their daughter, sculptor Anna Mahler.

But it turns out that two other émigré composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, who were both influenced by Mahler, created the modern symphonic film score. And what better Hollywood connection than Anna Mahler (whose bust of Klemperer is one of the first things you see entering the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), who even appeared on Groucho Marx’s radio show, “You Bet Your Life.”

Mahler, indeed, grooves. I don’t know whether Dudamel has pasted a bumper sticker on his car (they’re for sale at Disney Hall’s gift shop), but his mastery of Mahler has grown immensely. He opened the festival with “Blumine,” which Mahler originally intended as a movement of the First Symphony but eliminated in a later revision, and the Adagio from his 10th Symphony, his last.

Together, this bloom of a beginning and an end-of-life meditation created a sensation of incredible richness. Dudamel forced nothing. Mahler seemed to just be. Last week with the Seventh, “Song of the Night,” Dudamel reveled in soundscapes, capturing with startling immediacy Mahler’s weirdly evocative night music surrounded by tragedy and triumph, resonating overwhelmingly in fire-ravaged L.A.

Little symbolizes L.A. resilience like the Mahlerthon. Five hundred young musicians can’t be wrong.

Still, further confirmation of resilience came with Dudamel’s blazingly brilliant performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on Thursday. Mahler in L.A. means an orchestra in which Dudamel has hired half the players, Disney Hall’s unique ambiance and acoustics, and a demonstrative love affair between music director and audience.

While announcing his final season as music director of the L.A. Phil at a news conference Thursday, Dudamel affirmed a commitment to the city in which he came of age and where his son was born. He also slyly confessed his wish to complete Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle begun here with the L.A. Phil, if it will let him.

On Tuesday, Dudamel will make appear at the New York Philharmonic press conference announcing the season in which he becomes music director designate. When Dudamel conducted Mahler’s Fifth in New York, he accidentally broke Leonard Bernstein’s baton during the performance. But that was a long time ago.