"The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything," composer Gustav Mahler once said.
Mahler's Fifth Symphony will be highlighted at this weekend's Brown University Orchestra concert and is one of five fifth symphonies being played over the course of this orchestra season.
"As I was putting the season together, I thought it was time to let the pendulum swing back to more traditional music this year," said Paul Phillips, the conductor of Brown's orchestra. "It does seem like a way to unify the season."
Every year, Phillips uses input from his orchestra students to choose a theme around which the concerts revolve. The decision to focus on fifth symphonies this year emphasizes the significance of the fifth symphony in a composer's body of work.
"Before Beethoven came along, composers wrote plenty of symphonies," Phillips said. Yet with Beethoven's fifth, the model changed. Now, the fifth symphony "tells a story increasing in size and scope," he said.
This weekend, Mahler's and Mozart's fifth symphonies will be performed along with a complementary piece, Max Bruch's "Romance for Viola and Orchestra," which will feature Andrew Nixon GS. Mozart's piece, written when the composer was nine years old, will serve as a short, welcoming piece to the concert.
Mahler's symphonies "as pieces of music are pure genius," said Associate Professor of Music David Josephson, who studies the European musical tradition. "As social documents, they are magnificent expressions of modernism at the turn of the century in central Europe."
He added that composers such as Mahler who wrote in the early 1900s had "uncanny insight into their time and understood that underneath material prosperity and calm, the earth was rumbling." This insight is clearly exhibited in Mahler's Fifth, he said.
Mahler's Fifth is "draining," Josephson said.
"When you hear an orchestra play the piece, you hear an orchestra struggle and then triumph," he said. "You're made to jump through hoops of every emotion put together."
In contrast, Mozart's Fifth Symphony is much simpler. It's "a charming little piece, but not the mature Mozart," Josephson said. Phillips explained the choice of Mozart's Fifth as a warm-up piece that maintained the focus on fifth symphonies.
After all, he said, playing "four fifth symphonies over the course of the season didn't seem right."
The orchestra performs this Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. in Sayles Hall.
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