In Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, when the conductor turns to acknowledge the audience, the composer’s name that greets them, dead-centre – one of 46 inscribed around the balcony and walls – is Mahler’s. It’s no coincidence because of the great ‘Mahler cities’ – alongside New York and Vienna – the Dutch capital embraced his music and has held it tight, almost without break, from the early 20th century to the present day. The performing tradition instigated by Willem Mengelberg, Chief Conductor of the (now Royal) Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1895 (when he was 24!) to 1945, has been passed from successor to successor without pause: from Eduard van Beinum to Bernard Haitink, to Riccardo Chailly, to Mariss Jansons, to Daniele Gatti and now to Klaus Mäkelä.

A major milestone in Amsterdam’s love affair with Mahler’s music came in 1920 when Mengelberg conducted the nine completed symphonies as well as Das klagende Lied, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, Das Lied von der Erde and the five Rückert-Lieder over 15 days (the occasion was ostensibly to mark Mengelberg’s 25th anniversary at the head of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, though modestly he preferred to mark what would have been Mahler’s 60th birthday). In 1995, during Riccardo Chailly’s conductorship, another Mahler Festival (marking 75 years since the first one) took place, but this time other orchestras and conductors were invited to share the music making (the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics came, along with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales). A centenary Mahler Festival was planned for 2020, but the pandemic did for that, so this year it’s back on the schedule from May 8 to 18.

Masterminded by Marian van der Meer, Concert Programmer/Artistic Coordinator at the Concertgebouw (the festival has been organised by the hall, not the orchestra), the line-up is suitably de luxe. Alongside the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Mäkelä (Nos 1 and 8), the visiting orchestras are the Budapest Festival (with Iván Fischer, Nos 2 and 5), the NHK Symphony (with Fabio Luisi, Nos 3 and 4), the Chicago Symphony (with Jaap van Zweden, Nos 6 and 7) and the Berliner Philharmoniker (with Kirill Petrenko, No 9, and Daniel Barenboim, No 10’s Adagio and Das Lied von der Erde). The symphonies will be performed chronologically, and for the diehard Mahlerian passe-partout tickets are available for the lot (€1008-1950). Marian van der Meer also revealed that ‘the festival will be available for all Amsterdammers and visiting tourists. Every concert will be live broadcast on a massive screen on the square in front of the Concertgebouw with very good audio quality. That’s the thing that people who came to the ’95 Festival still talk about, so we want to re-create that feeling.’

I went over to the Netherlands last autumn to meet some of the key players in the Mahler in Amsterdam story but before I set out Michael Haas, former Decca and Sony Classical producer and now on the staff of Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, sent me a chapter from his forthcoming book on the reception of Mahler’s music by his contemporaries (Gustav Mahler, Julius Korngold and the Neue Freie Presse, due from Routledge this spring). It contains a report on the 1920 Mahler Festival by the composer and critic Egon Wellesz. ‘Here in sober, but artistically sensitive Amsterdam,’ Wellesz wrote (in Haas’s translation), ‘Mahler’s spirit lives on. Everyone knew him, valued him and recognised his greatness. His unique qualities are met with the deferential respect one offers to people who are seen as important enough to merit such entitlement. The spirit that lives in his symphonies and his mystical religiosity are felt in this city. There is acceptance and understanding of Mahler’s great creative arches as well as an understanding of the tiniest details. One maintains here, without any prejudice, the necessary and respectful distance from the creative artist.’

Mengelberg’s conducting score of Mahler’s Fourth (Archive of Willem Mengelberg)

Willem Mengelberg was Mahler’s first great champion, and one of his most loyal, something that Frits Swart, the conductor’s biographer, proudly explains when we meet before a concert. Mengelberg’s now classic live recording of the Fourth Symphony in 1939, he reminds me, was one of 112 performances of the work he gave in Amsterdam (incidentally, in its new remastering by the Willem Mengelberg Society, it’s sounding better than ever). Mengelberg’s introduction to Mahler’s music in Krefeld in Germany in 1902, with the Third Symphony, marked the start of a lifelong service to his music. Mengelberg invited Mahler to the Netherlands on five occasions to conduct his music, and he’d sit in on the rehearsals (having already ‘pre-rehearsed’ his orchestra to give Mahler the greatest opportunity to work on nuance rather than basics), and he’d annotate his score with details of what he witnessed.

Mengelberg’s conducting scores are an invaluable part of the Amsterdam Mahler tradition, and they too have a role in the Mahler Festival. One of the Royal Concertgebouw’s first violinists, Michael Waterman, has created a new set of parts of, initially, the First and Ninth to incorporate markings made by all of the orchestra’s chief conductors to create a ‘Concertgebouw Orchestra edition’. As you might imagine, for the players still using the parts with Mengelberg’s markings on, overlaid by all the conductors since, deciphering the notes had started to become an issue. So Waterman initially decided – aided by the downtime offered by Covid – to create a new set of parts for his violin colleagues that enshrined the orchestra’s inherited tradition, like phrasing, portamento, bowings and so on. As the pandemic dragged on, he gradually began to create parts for the entire orchestra. ‘When the parts were done,’ he explained, ‘I figured, okay, now there needs to be a conductor’s score because Klaus needs to see what’s going on – otherwise there’s no way for him to know. So I got his score with his markings in it, which I’ve put into this as well. So now his markings are in our parts. Our parts are now all the same. Usually the first desk has most of the indications from the conductor, and then as you move backwards, there might be some discrepancy. So now we all, for the first time, have the same parts. And at the end of this season, after we’ve played Mahler’s First in Amsterdam, in the US, in Vienna and, again, in Amsterdam, I will collect them again and add any new markings. I have a digital file where blue markings are old, red markings are new. So Klaus is right now in red. I’ll close the ’24-25 season, and then we can just keep doing this. So I’ve brought the archive up to date, so you can basically see the 100-year tradition, and the new at the same time.’ So, when the festival opens with the First Symphony, there will be a genuine engagement with the long Amsterdam Mahler tradition.

All of the (Royal) Concertgebouw’s chief conductors have been committed, fine – and, thankfully, well-documented – Mahlerians. It does raise the slightly chicken-and-egg question, ‘Which came first, the job or a love of Mahler’s music?’ Hans Alting, who has played the trumpet in the orchestra for 41 years – ‘Haitink was my musical father,’ he happily confides – believes that the orchestra would never choose a chief conductor who didn’t have a palpable sympathy for the composer’s work. Alting joined the orchestra in 1984 and played in Mahler’s Third under Haitink at his first Christmas concert. ‘That concert will always stay in my memory,’ he told me after a pre-tour run-through of Mahler’s First with Mäkelä. ‘And when we’d travel around the world giving concerts, people would all talk about Bernard’s Mahler. And his final concert with us was Mahler’s Ninth – the famous concert when he dropped his baton.’ Other Mahler interpreters Alting recalls with great affection are Leonard Bernstein, whose first Amsterdam Mahler was No 9, and then there were Nos 1 and 4. ‘I still remember with Bernstein that he paid so much attention to every forte-piano, every accent, and also that they were not always the same. Sometimes they were a little longer, sometimes exact, sometimes even a little shocking. There was also a Mahler Ninth with Daniele Gatti. He took one rehearsal for each movement and would really go into these kinds of details. This accent might be staccato here, legato there. And this was really amazing. And we did No 5 with Klaus Tennstedt. What I still remember with him was the Trauermarsch at the beginning. He worked not just on the trumpet part but everywhere there was the triola [the three opening fanfare-like notes]. He really had a sort of vision about how to play this triola, and how it should be played in every part.’

Alting, while having great memories of the big symphonies, admires Mäkelä’s approach to the First, one of the symphonies he’ll conduct at the Mahler Festival (and which he’s recently done on tour in the US to generally very fine reviews). ‘Maybe some conductors have more sort of “easiness” with the big ones. But I think Mahler No 1 and No 4, are very transparent. Mahler was 18 when he wrote No 1. It’s a young man’s music. I remember it used to be quite tricky for us, with tuning and so forth, especially at the start, but nowadays it’s perfectly in tune.

‘Klaus is such a gentle guy, but he already knows exactly what he wants. This reminds me a lot of Bernard Haitink who also had a very clear image, and sound, in his head. He was always very stressed before a concert, but as soon as he was on the podium he was in his world, and he took the orchestra into this world too. And I think this is also one of the special qualities of Klaus, that he totally has this sort of sound concept – and not only for Mahler. And when he starts to conduct he takes people with him.’

I sit down with Klaus Mäkelä after that morning Mahler First run-through. ‘I’m always stunned by how many times Mengelberg conducted Mahler’s Fourth with this orchestra,’ he tells me. ‘112 times! And then there was the time that Mahler himself conducted the work twice in the same concert in 1904. And he wrote home to Alma saying “Oh, this was such a great idea from Mengelberg”. But Mengelberg’s recording of the work is one I always go back to. It’s just so interesting. I love listening to old recordings because I love hearing ways of playing that are radically different from today, especially if they have a historical context like this – obviously for the string playing, but also for the piano playing, and the rubato freedom. It’s really a different world.’

willemmengelberg.nl – the website of the Willem Mengelberg Society and mahlerfestival.concertgebouw.nl/ for information and tickets