Mahler's Second, Seoul Arts Center

While Christine and I were in BC this summer for a vacation from our vacation, I received an email from our friend Zee back in Seoul alerting me to some upcoming Mahler performances there. She wanted to know if she could buy some tickets for us before the concerts were sold out (we had been skunked a few months earlier). Now that's a good friend. She knew the focal point of our Sydney visit in February had been an (incredible) performance of Mahler's Eighth, and that I had a history of travelling within North America for noteworthy Mahler performances, and spending everything I could scrape together to hear the LSO or LPO play Mahler while I was living in London years ago. From time to time I've made a habit of scanning the web for upcoming concerts, but tend to curtail this trolling-for-Mahler activity when finances prevent any follow-up action.


"Why Mahler?", someone once asked me at a dinner party. I couldn't answer him - it seemed like such a ridiculous question. Does anyone consciously, methodically weigh art forms and their practitioners to select a tidy handful of personal favourites? I first heard Mahler's music when I was a sixteen-year-old rock drummer with an avid thirst for Led Zeppelin, Foghat and Deep Purple. The combined senior student and faculty orchestra at the Courtenay Youth Music Centre was preparing to perform the Third for the summer's final concert, and I was responsible for the cymbal part - an appropriate assignment. At the first rehearsal, as soon as the idiosyncratic first movement began to erupt and unravel around me, I felt the floor beneath my feet completely disappear. There was no decision-making process. This music that was elevating and suspending me couldn't have reached me on a more personal, emotional, instinctive level if the hundred musicians around me were playing my DNA. In Mahler's emotional intensity, unapologetic sentimentality, temporal complexity, and fearlessly episodic storytelling, I recognized a voice my spirit needed to hear, and always would. 

This 2010-2011 concert season is a big one for Mahler performances. This year marks the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth, and next year is the centennial of his death. There are probably Mahler cycles being performed all over the world, but I haven't brought myself to check for them during these somewhat lean times. Thankfully, Zee caught wind of the four symphonies the Seoul Philharmonic are performing this fall, and bought me a pair of tickets for all four: the Second, Tenth, First and Third. In total, the eight tickets cost less than what I've paid for a single seat in New York.

The performance of the Second Symphony was the first event Christine and I had attended at the Seoul Arts Center, an impressive 1990s-era facility with multiple venues and an opulent mall-like unifying plaza. We didn't get much of a chance to take it all in because we were rushing (as usual) to get to the concert in time. We had taken the subway's Line 2 for about 15 stops, then waited a few minutes for a bus, which we accidentally climbed off one stop too early.

The interior of the concert hall was substantial, but not enormous.  It had the vertical feel of Carnegie Hall, with the uppermost seats looking more down on the stage than across miles of heads towards it. The rows of very comfy seats were stacked fairly steeply, so the sightlines and sense of privacy were exceptional. We sat up in the gods, but it felt like the dress circle, with the deep stage almost as tall from our vantage as it was wide. The fan-shaped hall was finished entirely in dulled mahogany, except for the stage, which glowed with incandescent-lit maple.  In the audience, one felt like a small child sitting on the living room carpet facing an enormous, expensive 1950s-vintage British hi-fi speaker. From the sounds of the musicians warming up (thankfully devoid of dashed-off snippets from the piece we were about to hear), it was clear that the hall's sound was full and lively. It was going to get loud in there, and the room was going to let it. Hot damn.


There was lots to appreciate even while waiting for the concert to begin. For one, the orchestra was suitably enormous, and included twelve basses, sixteen cellos, sixteen violas, two tam-tams, and a pair of large church bells (a requirement of the Second I'd never seen filled before). Unexpectedly, the violas were seated downstage left, and the cellos were upstage of them, which allowed the cellos' soundboards to face the audience to an unusual extent. The seating plan had obviously been chosen for sonic reasons - a very good sign. Both timpanists had a huge number of different mallet types at the ready, and there were three sets of crash cymbals, as well as two pair of suspended cymbals. When the choir entered, they did so in an almost disarmingly orderly fashion, filling the width of the three rows of seats behind the stage like two viscous fluids: black for the men, white for the women. Koreans don't range in size like North Americans do, so the effect was beautifully uniform, like the keys on a piano.

Like many Asian languages, Korean has an important pitch component that goes beyond simple inflection as we native English speakers know it. Someone recently explained to me that this characteristic may be responsible for the remarkable intonation one hears in Asian musicians and singers, both amateur and professional. And Koreans love to sing, unashamedly doing so at any fun gathering. Maybe the predominantly-Asian makeup of the orchestra had some bearing on the following. Whatever the reason, the complete absence of intonation problems in the Seoul Philharmonic was truly stunning. I'm not at all hypersensitive to intonation (I'm a drummer, after all), but it's unmistakingly elevating when all intonation is unexpectedly perfect. The orchestra was equally adept at dynamics, in both solo and ensemble work. All soloists were absolutely superb and wonderfully expressive. I've never heard such a tight, sonorous trombone section in my life. If the SPO had a flaw (and this is getting very nit-picky), it's that its rhythms sometimes lacked a degree of fierceness in precision, so dotted rhythms would sometimes be just a bit jaunty. That said, the lively hall might have something to do with it. Besides, I honestly don't think I could've handled the orchestra being any better than they were. Mahler would've loved the Seoul Philharmonic.

I don't have a score with me and don't know it well enough to give a detailed account of the interpretation, but it was clearly chock full of sensitive mindfulness and intent. There's a section in the first movement just before the return to the movement's opening figure, where the fortissimo timps and brasses are playing a parallel triplet figure in sort of an anguished close-up of a fanfare. This was executed more slowly than usual, with the triplets and dotted figures given their full emotional weight. The emotional impact was staggering: it was like hearing the whole first movement with new ears. And the tumbling descent into the movement's final pizzicato notes was pulled off without a shred of buffoonery, with the spacing and dynamics of those three crucial final notes to perfectly set up the somber, funereal moment-of -silence that followed.

The second movement was played beautifully wistfully, without a hint of cynicism. The timpanist was allowed to begin the third movement without first receiving a tempo from the conductor - an idea that really strengthened the transition. That movement had the spooky swirliness of the Seventh Symphony's two nachtmusik movements. The fourth movement retained both the character of the original orchestral song, and that non-cadential interlude feeling that contributes to a sense of anticipation. Maybe that's how it sounded because I knew what was coming, but that's human nature for you. What came, by the way, was head-shakingly stunning and transcendental. Invisible fanfares hinted from every direction, graves opened, corpses marched, and all creatures discovered eternal, luminous life, utterly free of judgement. It was Mahler's vision and music delivered completely intact by a roomful of dedicated spirits, in an exceptional hall where no one coughed or dropped their programs. Countless curtain calls, an eventual (and equally stirring) encore performance of the finale's closing episode, and the most heartfelt and deserved shouts of "bravo" that I've ever heard. Two days later, I'm still shaking. I may yet look around to see what they're doing in New York, Philadelphia, London, Prague, and Vienna, but I now know that I'm a one-dollar subway ride away from my next world-class Mahler fix.


The subway was jammed on our way home. It's apparently been years since Seoul Metro employed people to physically stuff passengers onto the trains, but the effect would've been the same. Things eventually eased as we closer to our home stop, and we actually had a railing to lean against. It was only after we stepped off the train that I noticed my wallet was gone from my pocket. I rarely carry more than the tiniest amount of cash (to avoid spending it on forgettable things), but this time I had had the equivalent of about $60 on me, as Christine and I had just been paid for a one-off voicing job and had hoped to use our winnings to finally reimburse Zee for all the concert tickets. After fruitlessly checking all my pockets and Christine's purse on the platform, we went upstairs and found the station's security office, where we reported the sad loss in our scrappy pidgin. I didn't care too much about my Canadian driver's licence or bank card: they weren't really relevant or valuable to me (or anyone) here in Korea. But the loss of the cash, small as it might seem, was quite a setback for us. The security officers gave us the contact information for the relevant lost & found office, showed us a remarkable feature on their website where one can see uploaded photos of turned-in items (a system that would be too prone to abuse to ever be implemented in North America), and took my phone number.

The next day, I unsuccessfully tried to scan the Seoul Metro's recent lost & found items online, then took the subway six stops to City Hall station where the indicated office was. A lone cheerful ajumma was manning the counter at the lost & found, which contained a large tidy collection of briefcases and shopping bags on compartmentalized shelves. This was no great surprise, as locals typically toss anything they're carrying onto the convenient open shelves above the subway seats, where the itemscould easily be (and obviously were) subsequently forgotten. I had looked up the Korean word for "wallet" in my guidebook ("chigap"), and offered it to the woman, while making cartoon pantomime gestures suggesting loss. "Name?", she said. "Robert Robson" I offered in deliberate handling of the tongue-twisting laterals. She smiled and showed me the brown wallet - mine! - that had already been sitting in her hand. I couldn't believe it. "Where from?" she asked."Ca-na-da. Ban-cou-ber." I offered, observing the Korean pronunciation. "How much?" She was testing me to see if I knew how much money was in the wallet. "Chil-man-on?" I stumbled through my clumsy attempt at saying seventy-thousand won (about $63). She shook her head, and I was momentarily crestfallen that the much-needed cash was apparently gone. "Yuk-man, chil chun-on" she said, handing me the wallet, having indicated that there was in fact only sixty-seven thousand won in it. She wasn't being playful - counting money accurately is serious business here. I was flabbergasted. Someone had found and turned in my wallet without helping themselves at all to its liquid, untraceable contents. Stories like this one are apparently common in Korea, where a penchant for petty crime just isn't part of the cultural makeup. Chalk one up for human nature, the eye-opening benefits of world travel - and the incomparable people of Korea.