Mahler Chamber Orchestra: An Unconventional Journey of Musical Excellence and Collaboration

Little about the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is typical.

A nomadic European ensemble with no home base, it has undertaken more than 400 tours, usually coming together and rehearsing in the first city on each itinerary. It also has no conductor and makes all of its artistic decisions democratically.

It’s an unusual structure but one that has worked superbly for the group, which has gained an international reputation and won an abundance of recording honors. Its album featuring Beethoven’s Second and Fourth Piano Concertos, for example, won both the Concerto Award and Recording of the Year Award from BBC Music Magazine in 2015.

A particular hallmark of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra are its close relationships with soloists and conductors like famed British pianist Mitsuko Uchida, who has been an artistic partner since 2016.

Uchida will be the featured director and soloist when the group undertakes a three-city American tour that begins March 24 in Berkeley, Calif., and ends March 28 at New York’s Carnegie Hall. In the middle is a March 26 stop in Chicago as part of the Symphony Center Presents Chamber Music Series.

Uchida describes herself as a “real fan” of the ensemble, saying what drew her to it was the “psychology” of the ensemble. Even though she plays with some of its members in other contexts, she said, it’s different when they get together as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. “They transform somehow, and they play differently and so beautifully,” she said. “And, therefore, I am very closely associated with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.”

The group is an offshoot of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, which esteemed conductor Claudio Abbado (1933-2014) formed in 1986. A group of members who aged out of that ensemble still wanted to play together, so they formed what became the Mahler Chamber Orchestra with the maestro’s help.

Another conductor who has played an important role in the orchestra is Daniel Harding, who was music director in 2003-08 and later chief conductor and now holds the title of conductor laureate. He still provides artistic input along with conductor Danielle Gatti, who serves as artistic adviser. But today, the ensemble is conductorless, except for larger symphonic works, and it operates more like a string quartet or other chamber ensemble than a traditional orchestra.

“We really love that process,” said Alexandra Preucil. “We all have a say and we collaborate on what we want the outcome to sound like.” The first violinist joined the ensemble as a substitute in 2018 and has been full-time member for the past two seasons. She is one of five members who serve on the orchestra’s governing board, which works with an administrative staff to carry out the players’ collective vision.

The orchestra is composed of 45 players from 20 countries. Preucil, who lives in Vienna, is one of three from the United States. “I think that is one of the best things about us,” he said. “We just come from all of our own individual homes and meet in the city of the first concert and hold rehearsals there.”

The ensemble averages about one project a month, which gives the members time for other endeavors. Some of the players devote 50 percent of their time to the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and 50 percent to another ensemble. Preucil is full time, but she also teaches and serves as a guest concertmaster with other groups.

“It allows for a lot of variety in our careers,” Preucil said of the ensemble’s flexible schedule, “and then we come together as the MCO, and we are all so excited to be together and make music again. So, there is always this fresh and dedicated environment, which is what I think really resonated with our work with Mitsuko.”

A defining aspect of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra are its artistic partners, what Preucil calls “best musical friends.” “It’s a really unique, collaborative process where we both get to follow a kind of journey that an artist wants to have with us,” she said. Current partners include violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist Yuja Wang.   

“It’s been a very natural process,” Preucil said. “We are a unique orchestra who really cares so much and goes above and beyond with the people we collaborate with, and so a friendship is always created during our time together, and the ones who really connect, like Mitsuko, who seems to really care about all of us on such a personal level, always asking about our families and our lives, the nature of artistic partnership just happens.”

One such previous artistic partner was famed pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who collaborated with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on “The Beethoven Journey,” an epic four-season undertaking that ended in 2015 after taking him to 108 cities in 27 countries for more than 230 solo and collaborative performances. He joined the orchestra for 10 residencies in 10 cities during the last year of the project where in each they performed all five of the concertos.

Andsnes, a regular soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, told Experience CSO in 2015 that he had toured with the ensemble in 2002 and had been impressed with its musicianship, so he approached the group about the project. “They were very interested,” he said. “They hadn’t done a Beethoven cycle like this, but it was quite a wild idea to commit to three years.”

The two started performing together in May 2012 and went on to record the complete set of concertos, with the project’s three CDs being released as a boxed set on the Sony Classical label in October 2014.  “This last year,” he said in 2015, “I’ve worked more than two months together with them very intensely. We did so many concerts. Toward the end, it felt like such a free and wonderful thing to do. Everybody knew this music from the inside and that led to even freer performances and more spontaneity.”

For its upcoming American tour, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra will perform two of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 21 mature solo piano concertos (two of his other concertos are for two and three pianos respectively), which Uchida called “some of the greatest masterpieces of all music.”

Unlike Beethoven’s piano concertos, which she described as “confrontational,” the Mozart concertos are “conversational.” “That is the nature of Mozart as a person and as a composer,” she said. And it was this quality that drew her to the idea of serving as both the soloist and director for the performances of these works. “It’s conversing,” she said. “I say something and something comes back to me.”

Uchida chose Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453, and Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, K. 482, which she called “very special pieces.” Just before the composer wrote No. 17, he composed a woodwind quintet, and the transformation of how he used the wind instruments following that work is “really astonishing.” “From that point on, the rest of the piano concerti, except for one, they are real operas, with soloist voices for the flute, oboe and bassoon and piano,” she said.

The Concerto No. 22 is one of just three of the solo piano concertos to employ clarinets and it is one of just two in which Mozart chose those instruments instead of oboes. “So, from that point of view, it is a very special sound world,” Uchida said. “The E-flat is one of the strongest and most imaginative and grandest pieces among the concerti, and it has such poignant moments, not only once in the piece but twice – serious farewells.”

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra will next collaborate with Uchida during four concerts in June at the Ojai (Calif.) Music Festival. “We’re so lucky to have this period of her creative output be connected to us and that we get to go on that journey with her,” Preucil said. “I think the audience will really feel that in the way that we’ve grown together in this Mozart process.”

Along with the program’s two concertos, the ensemble will perform the Chorale Quartet by German composer Jörg Widmann, with José Maria Blumenschein serving as concertmaster and leader. “One of the great things with Mitsuko is that she gives us this space in between her concertos to explore something independently as an orchestra,” Preucil said.

Originally composed for string quartet, this version of the work is written for flute, oboe, bassoon, celesta and string orchestra and was premiered by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 2020. The piece was inspired in part by Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ” and similarly deals with the crucifixion.

“My piece starts at the final stage of this experience,” Widmann writes in his accompanying notes. “It contains a number of lost sounds, phrases of futility which come from nowhere and lead to nowhere. The horrifying rubbing and sanding of skin and wood become the ’theme’ of the piece which is combined with tonal, choral-like melodies. I am interested in how to make noises no longer symbolize desolation and tonal phrases no longer represent confidence.”