dress1012

Moments from rehearsals were used to illustrate key points. Along the way, we traveled with Mr. Tilson Thomas to places important to the composer in question. Part II, then, was devoted to a full formal-dress performance of the piece. Mahler, however, "was a much more complicated case," says Mr. Tilson Thomas. So although Part I looks as if it is building toward a performance of Mahler's First Symphony, Part II simply continues the life-and-works documentary through Mahler's itinerant, rising career as a conductor in Prague, Budapest, Leipzig, Hamburg, Vienna and New York, with long pieces of Symphonies 6, 7 and 9 and the often heartbreaking song cycles. "There's only so much we can fit into the PBS program structure," he says. Mr. Tilson Thomas writes out in advance what he wants to get across in each episode, which allows him to look a viewer in the eye and talk as in private conversation, "and by magic suddenly we're continuing the conversation in St. Petersburg, or wherever it is we are." This shifting from his living room to Davies Symphony Hall and to locations from the composer's life was especially important, he felt, for Mahler, who grew up in a small garrison town in what is now the Czech Republic, living over his father's tavern a block away from the town square and army parade ground. Marching-band music, tavern songs by soldiers from many parts of the Hapsburg Empire, Gypsy and folk tunes, Jewish music, Christian choral music, music evocative of verdant woods and streams just minutes away all fed into Mahler's own style.