For many the name Mahler conjures (among other) images, one of sprawling orchestras. The Rembrandt Chamber Players’ Mahler Project, which culminates in a fast-approaching concert at the Merit School of Music’s Gottlieb Hall, has served to emend such associations via its annual performances of, you guessed it, “chamber” versions of Mahler masterworks. Rembrandt promises to show again that Mahler’s music does not necessarily call for 100+ performers on a stage the size of a small island nation in its March 23rd performance of Das Lied von der Erde, conducted by Jane Glover. One might wonder what a group of “chamber players” is doing putting on Das Lied. Well, in the years following Mahler’s death another vaguely iconoclastic composer, Arnold Schoenberg, was concerned about the endurance and public appreciation of (then) contemporary music. In 1918 he founded a group/series dubbed the “Society for Private Musical Performances.” For this project Schoenberg, with the assistance of his student Erwin Stein, arranged for small ensembles many larger pieces they felt were not getting enough exposure (if, indeed, any). They then arranged arrangements for the performance of these arrangements. If you’re like me, and you’ve have had a hard time getting six musicians together to so much as go to trivia night at a bar, much less hundreds to play large-scale new music, you can see their reasoning. Anyway, part of the mission of the Schoenberg/Stein “Mahler Project” (if you will) was for people to a) hear great music in the first place, and b) enjoy that music in an intimate, informative, “private” setting. This is what the Rembrandt Chamber Players’ March 23rd concert promises to provide. Hearing music typically heard courtesy of over a hundred people come from the hands and mouths of a mere fifteen is refreshing. It reminds me of a ritual of my wind quintet at Curtis. When something sounded bad in rehearsal, and we couldn’t figure out why exactly, we’d look at each other, (grimace), and say, “Okay okay okay. Let’s play really softly, and really slowly, and listen very carefully.” The Schoenberg Mahler transcriptions let you do just that. No, not sound like a struggling young wind quintet (tempting as that may be), but to hear and attend to things that, I don’t care if you’ve the ears of God, you cannot hear in a full orchestral performance. Imagine, hearing an individual string player in a fortissimo Mahler passage. A rare opportunity, and a great chance to get to say, “Now THAT I haven’t heard before!” Also, ironically, the original Das Lied is now performed far more often than the arrangement Schoenberg and Stein made so it could be heard in the first place. The rarity of such performances and the opportunity to hear some rarely heard musical intricacies are two great reasons to attend Rembrandt’s March 23rd concert, and two of many that I’ll be there. © Tim Sawyier, 2010