Review | MAW’s Masterful Mahler, an Epic yet Friendly Adieu

It is somehow civically and culturally affirming to report that last Saturday’s big finale of the Music Academy of the West’s summer and season nearly packed the house. Drilling down into relevant numbers, this was the Big House, the 1,500-seater Granada Theatre, and a categorically big meal of a program, being Mahler’s 75-ish minute epic “Symphony No. 3.” By the gushing conclusion of the intermission-less evenings, the crowd went duly wild and many of us felt enthralled to be part of a collective musical extravaganza. 

Yes, classical music is very much alive and well during Santa Barbara summers, thanks to the Academy’s movable feast of a festival. 

This take on the Third Symphony was given a bold and nuanced rendering by noted guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya (returning to the Academy after a few years since his last appearance) and the technical finesse and finery of the tender young Academy fellows — in more ample numbers than usual — filling the Granada stage, alongside a women’s chorus and, eventually, the young charges of the Sing! chorus. 

As the conductor said of the landmark piece, before jumping into its pool, “this piece reminds us of the saying that you cannot touch music, but music can touch you.” And so it did.

Mahler’s Third may be vast, at least by the standards of standard symphony repertoire, but Saturday’s performance reminded us that the sweeping and varied score creates a pleasant sonic world to hang out in for an hour-and-change. 

It was written in 1898, preceding Mahler’s 40th birthday and the dawn of the twentieth century, during which the Austrian composer delved into more dense and demanding pre-Modernist music. In a way, thinking retrospectively and in terms of musical history, the Third feels like a fond and wistful farewell to the romantic century in music, before the storms and progressive turns to come around the corner of the fin de siecle.

Which is not to say Mahler’s Third lacks signature features of the composer’s grand vocabulary and lyrical graces. The opening movement, a massive meal unto itself, plots its course over dynamic and emotional changes, from a funereal air in the beginning to a pre-summery character and big, brassy and percussion-punctuated climaxes. Mahler loved to marshal reckoning orchestral forces, without apology or half steps. The AFO knew how to go there, and beat a tasteful retreat into suppler stuff. From the delicate and lyrical waltz turns of the second movement, the third Scherzando movement marches to a more insistent pulse, through thicker and thinner passages and the mysterious gauzy presence of an offstage trumpeter part beckoning from the wings, just out of reach. It’s a dream deferred moment, yanked back into focus by the sound of a bright trumpet part onstage.

In the fourth and fifth movement, the human voice gives a fresh empathetic layer to the heretofore instrumental canvas. The 24-year-old mezzo-soprano Julia Holomon, rich in tone and expressive naturalism, beautifully intoned the score’s fragments of text from Nitsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” The dark tinge of the theme is lightened by the sound of children’s voices and a cheery melodic flowering in the fifth, here brought to radiant life by the Sing! chorus. 

The Symphony’s second longest movement, the sixth, opens with an extended and languid string theme which seems like a seedbed for the more famous, achingly lovely slow movement of his Symphony No. 5. Working through a gradual build and crescendo arc of a structure, the movement wends its way towards a final, protracted and tympani-massaged resolving chord.

Voilà, that last elasticized orchestral chord was the final sonic touch of the MAW 2025 year, and a fine calming way to make an exit.

Taking Account of the Academy Season 

Naturally, the end of a season also invites a retrospective look at what this summer festival had to offer. As led and created by CEO Shana Quill and Chief Artistic Officer Nate Bachhuber, the program struck a particularly admirable balance. More casual listeners — and potential classical fans still testing the waters — might have been drawn to the Jaws @ 50 live orchestral screening, the PercussionFest featuring music of Stewart (The Police) Copeland, affable crossover crusader Chris Thile at the Montecito Club gala, and the marathon crescendo experiment of the perennial crowd-pleasing Bolero (one of many Ravel thankfully pieces folded into the mix this year).

Among new concepts worth keeping, the “Conversation & Composers” series celebrates living composers, in-house, and the “Brass at the Bandshell” extends a valuable community outreach to ears of all ages in the newly renovated 1919-vintage Plaza del Mar Bandshell. Free McConnell’s ice cream did not influence my positive review of that event. As far as I know.

Personally, a couple of festival trips across the Atlantic kept me from catching as much as I had hoped, but I was duly impressed by the Takács @ 50 concert early on, a particularly moving production of the Mozart opera Don Giovanni (gone Hollywood, ala the ‘30s) and especially pianist-thinker Jeremy Denk’s three-night stand of Beethoven sonatas and interstitial detours, with inspiration, information and wit fully attached. Best of fest? Methinks yes.

All in all, several thumbs up. MAW delivered on multiple fronts, once again. Now for the short August’s sleep.