CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Music lovers in Central Illinois will have the rare opportunity of hearing selections from the symphonic works of Gustav Mahler performed on the piano during a free concert on the University of Illinois campus. The Oct. 23 performance and lecture are in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth.
Marialena Fernandes and Ranko Markovic will perform a program titled “Mahler at the Piano.” The concert in Urbana kicks off the pianists’ recital tour, which includes lectures and performances in New York, Montreal and Ottawa before wrapping up in Los Angeles.
Mahler composed only one piano quartet, preferring to concentrate on orchestral compositions.
“Mahler on the piano is something that almost never happens, although his fifth symphony was interpreted by the master himself on a welt-mignon roll piano,” Fernandes said.
Fernandes and Markovic have been performing as a four-hand duo for a decade, receiving special acclaim for performances of transcribed symphonies by Mahler and Austrian composer Anton Bruckner in Austria, England, India, Italy, Kazakhstan and Poland.
Born in Mumbai, India, Fernandes is a professor of chamber music at – and an alumnus of – the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, where she earned a diploma in piano performance with unanimous distinctions. Before she joined the university’s faculty in 1991, she was a professor of piano at the Joseph Haydn Conservatory in Eisenstadt, Austria.
Fernandes has performed with members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and in solo, chamber and orchestral concerts in most European capitals, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in major performance venues around the world.
Markovic, who was born in Zagreb, Croatia, is the artistic director of the Vienna Conservatory. A graduate of the University Mozarteum in Salzburg, he completed his studies at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, the Liszt Academy in Budapest and in London. His recent lectures, master classes and performances have included institutions such as the Musikverein, Vienna; the Philharmony Hall in St. Petersburg and the Shanghai Conservatory.
Fernandes and Markovic first met when they were judges at a competition. The idea to collaborate on a Mahler project was spawned when a colleague found the transcribed piano score for four hands of Mahler’s “tragic symphony,” Symphony No. 6, at a flea market and contacted Fernandes.
“This colleague was the artistic director of a festival in a place where Brahms, Schoenberg and Mahler all took their summer vacations,” Fernandes said. “He said it would be a great idea for us to come and perform it there, and a seed was sown. But when we looked at the score, it was just impossible, musically and technically, and we put it away.
“We bought a lot of CDs and compared the various versions and sat with the score, scrutinizing every instrument, every mode and phrase, and then performed it in Lower Austria Payerbach, a place in the mountains where Mahler and Alexander Zemlinsky played it together on the piano. We were invited to put the sixth symphony on CD, and we realized that we wanted to interpret Mahler’s symphonic works on the piano and perform excerpts that reflected his genius.”
Next year, Fernandes and Markovic plan to mark the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death on May 18 by performing a memorial concert with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Mahler died in 1911 at age 51 “after an incredibly short but concentrated life” that was fraught with tragedy – including a sibling’s suicide and the death of Mahler’s young daughter – and was blighted by emotional instability, interpersonal conflicts, anti-Semitism and societal alienation, marital infidelity and poor health, Fernandes said.
Despite many successes, Mahler also struggled with professional disappointment, including his dismissal as director of the Vienna Court Opera, and rejection of his symphonies, which were viewed as inharmonious, clamorous and excessively long. Mahler said that his technically difficult, multi-layered compositions reflected life; Fernandes said they also mirrored the emotional and psychological complexities of the composer.
Although Mahler’s compositions were largely forgotten for the first 50 years after his death, interest in his work rekindled during the mid-1900s and eventually generated the recognition that eluded him in life. Today, he is regarded as one of the last great Romantic composers, whose innovations inspired the musical styles and tones of the modernist era.
Mahler’s sixth and seventh symphonies were written for about 100 instruments, but the transcriptions that Fernandes and Markovic will play reduce the orchestra to one piano.
“What we’re trying to do is to get people into a different sphere of listening, where they hear, for example, cowbells, mandolins or flutes – an entire orchestra – in just the piano,” Fernandes said.”
The Oct. 23 program will include Zemlinsky’s transcriptions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” Overture and Mahler’s Symphony No. 6: “Scherzo;” as well as Alfredo Casella’s transcriptions of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7: Nachtmusik I and Nachtmusik II, and of “Pagine di Guerra, Op. 25: Quattro ‘Films’ Musicali,” as well as Mahlers transcription of Bruckners Symphony No. 3.
The recital and lecture, free and open to the public, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Smith Memorial Hall, 805 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. The lecture is supported by the Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art Fund/College of Fine and Applied Arts.
Fernandes, who is in residence at the U. of I. for six weeks, also has organized a musical matinee on campus that will bring together student vocalists and instrumentalists from an array of genres, including jazz, chamber music and world music. The matinee performance, free and open to the public, will be 11:30-2 p.m. on Nov. 3 at Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.
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