The excitement is building as the Festival gets ready to welcome—this Sunday and Monday—a longtime friend who has yet to perform in Santa Fe: Donald Runnicles, the general music director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival, and chief conductor–designate of the Dresden Philharmonic. Runnicles makes his highly anticipated Festival debut leading one of the most beloved large-scale works in the chamber music repertoire: Mahler’s early-20th-century “song-symphony” Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).
“I’m thrilled that my dear friend and respected colleague Donald Runnicles will be here and will be sharing his acknowledged expertise in one of Mahler’s greatest works,” says Festival Artistic Director Marc Neikrug, whose 2016 ode to friendship, The Unicorn of Atlas Peak, Runnicles—the work’s dedicatee—premiered in 2017 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where he served as principal guest conductor for more than 20 years.
In a review of one of Runnicles’s performance of Das Lied with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Runnicles was the orchestra’s chief conductor from 2009 to 2016), the Financial Times described his conducting as having “the impact of a quake, an epiphany,” and added that “Mahler’s symphony for tenor and mezzo, often dubbed his 10th, sounded anything but the valedictory statement of a dying composer—the conventional interpretation. In Runnicles’ hands it came across as a passionate affirmation of life.”
Mahler was indeed a dying composer when he wrote Das Lied in 1908 and 1909, as he was diagnosed with a heart condition that would wind up killing him just four years later at the age of 50. That diagnosis came as Mahler was grieving the death of his four-year-old daughter, and during this time he was also dealing with the heartbreak of having to resign from his 10-year-long position as music director of the Vienna Staatsoper, where his tenure was transformative but tumultuous.
Mahler seemingly found comfort, consolation, or affirmation in a German version of ancient Chinese poems that reveal how the various pains of human existence may be common (perhaps even natural) but are nevertheless profound and often overwhelming. He went on to set six of those poems for the “song” part of his “song-symphony” and scored them for two vocalists. On Sunday and Monday, the songs are performed by mezzo-soprano Annika Schlicht and tenor Clay Hilley—two stunning and highly acclaimed singers who, like Runnicles, are making their Festival debuts this summer. (Schlicht is also making her US debut.) The “symphony” part of Das Lied on Sunday and Monday is a chamber orchestra arrangement that was begun by Arnold Schoenberg—who admired and appreciated Mahler, who supported his work—and completed by Rainer Riehn. The intimacy of this scaled-down arrangement heightens the power and poignancy of what’s often described as Mahler’s most personal work.
Tickets are going fast. Sunday is sold out, but you can get tickets for Monday online. For more information, call our Ticket Office at 505-982-1890.
