Mahler meets van Gogh

JOHN SLAVIN, REVIEWER

Date: 07/03/2006

The Age

ADELAIDE FESTIVAL: SONGS FROM A YELLOW BEDROOM David Wenham, Keith Lewis

and Bernadette Cullen with Australian Youth Orchestra, Adelaide Town Hall,

March 4-5

MAHLER'S Song Cycle Das Liede von der Erde interspersed with passages from

the letters of Vincent van Gogh, a concept proposed by the late Richard

Wherrett, has been realised by Wherrett's former collaborator Adam Cook

for the Adelaide Festival of Arts. As I entered the hall, I irreverently

thought: "Is this going to be Van Gogh - the Musical"?

There are parallels between a Viennese composer who marks the end of

19th-century Romanticism and a brave, lonely, Dutch painter whose work

initiates 20th-century Expressionism. They were contemporaries. Both were

influenced by "Asian" art: Van Gogh by Japanese woodcuts and Mahler by

Chinese poetry and Tao philosophy. Both revered nature as a source of

creative inspiration.

But there the connections end. Van Gogh explored nature's energies through

his extraordinary experiments in line and colour, while the composer was

gripped by introspective intimations of mortality.

With his earthy intensity, David Wenham is ideally suited to play Van

Gogh. The passages from his letters are chosen not as biography, but as

explorations of his deepening engagement with his art and philosophy. But

how do they connect with the six songs of the cycle?

These represent a kind of pastoral dialogue. Mahler's tenor (Keith Lewis)

exemplifies the life of the body while his mezzosoprano (Bernadette

Cullen) gives voice to the human spirit. Lewis sang the two drunken songs

against a youthful orchestra that played with astonishing vigour. Cullen's

rich vocal range explored themes of loneliness, beauty and elegiac

farewell, but these seem a galaxy away from Van Gogh's vibrant intensity.

There were moments when these disparate elements almost came together. The

artist's homily to Japanese artists who painted within nature "as though

they were flowers" is followed by the lyrical Ode to Beauty. Most moving

of all was the Farewell sung with great artistry by Cullen after the

enactment of Van Gogh's suicide. But Mahler's art is one of final

acquiescence, not rebellion. The whole in this synthesis was not as good

as the brilliant parts.

The Australian Youth Orchestra is a national treasure. Under Diego Masson,

its youthfulness made a poetic contrast to Mahler's valediction to life.