What was the last live performance you saw?
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
— Aldous Huxley
The prompt, ever curious, inquires about the last live concert I attended.
It was not so long ago — last Saturday night — when I found myself once again drawn to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, that venerable hall where music breathes with history. The occasion was the Mahler Festival, a ten-day pilgrimage of sound held across the city — a celebration that returns like a comet, rare and luminous.
Though I no longer attend concerts with the frequency of youth, I still seek them out when the call feels right. And this time, it did.
Amsterdam, generous in its cultural spirit, has long been a second home to music. Mahler himself felt it — in 1903, hearing the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mengelberg, he wrote: “I feel I have found a second musical homeland in Amsterdam.” Mengelberg, in turn, made of this admiration a legacy, imagining Amsterdam as Mahler’s Bayreuth, and gifted the city a tradition: all the symphonies, performed in reverent sequence.
I remember hearing Claudio Abbado lead the Berliner Philharmoniker here some thirty years ago, and Bernard Haitink, countless times, conducting Mahler with the grace only time can teach. His Ninth Symphony, in particular, I have heard more than once — but never like this.
Originally, I had planned to attend Mahler’s Second — that bold resurrection of the soul — performed by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. But resurrection, at this time, felt too lofty a hope. I was not in the mood for immortality. I was in the mood for goodbye.
So I chose Mahler’s Ninth — that tender farewell to life, that whispered benediction. And I was rewarded beyond measure. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Kirill Petrenko, played not just with precision, but with breath and heartbeat. The Adagio came like a fading light — colours deepening before dusk, then dissolving into silence. One could feel the emptiness — not cold, but vast, like the sky when the sun has just set. It was a night of rare beauty, shared with others who came, like me, to listen — to remember — and perhaps, quietly, to let go.
Netherlands, WJJH, 23.5.2025
Reflections: on attending the Mahler Festival at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, recalling its historical significance. Choosing to hear Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, finding beauty in its tender farewell to life. The performance, led by the Berlin Philharmonic, evokes deep emotions, offering solace and remembrance.
In what kind of world do we wish to live 
Thank you for this wonderful reminder of one of those creative works that can really transport us into other spheres, into another era of music and culture, into the blood and humors of one of the great composers of Western Civilization.
Mahler’s 9th is an extraordinary creation, one in which his way of listening to the world is exhibited in full colors. We are always moved from his subjective impressions of the world around him (the second movement Ländler with those tonal insertions that make the bucolic images he creates sound like musical Breughels. Always something a bit menacing, too…
And the end… I realize that we often feel that he was signing his own death warrant with that music, he knew he was sick, but he also came from a very dark family. If I remember correctly, he had a sister who was obsessed with death, and his daughter had just died a few years before. That is something you never get over. I find a similar quality, for example, in the final pages of Beethoven’s 32nd piano Sonata with which I fell in love when I was just a boy (we had the complete sonatas edited and performed by Artur Schnabel) …
I also feel, I’m hearing Mahler’s music, but he had picked up something that was in the air in Europe before the war. I wouldn’t want to get too mystical about this, but we do pick up a ”feeling” of unease when we feel the old system breaking up and we have no idea what is really coming. In music, tonality was beginning to disappear and other stricter forms were also being broken up. I wrote about this once at university, comparing music and art in general with mechanical reproducibility. At the time I was writing a lot of music reviews for a local newspaper.
Further, Mahler holds a particular place in my childhood, but more the third and 5th symphonies: my mother did many of the stills for Lucchino Visconti’s filmic interpretation of Mann’s Death in Venice, in which he used Mahler’s music (turning Aschenbach into a composer rather than a writer…).
(The last concert I went to was contemporary classical…)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dear Marton, thank you for your thoughtful message which is as music to my ears. I imagine Mahler sitting in his cabin close to nature, the same nature we when we get older start to appreciate more. I am sure he would have appreciated the performance of the Berliner. Later, W
LikeLike