Farewells and Thresholds | Mahler and Strauss at AFCM 2025

The Australian Festival of Chamber Music 2025 is still unfolding, but last night’s performance of a scaled-down Mahler Symphony No. 10 was a bold musical statement. Scored for just 17 players and conducted by Michael Collins, this interpretation used Michelle Castelletti’s chamber arrangement, bringing Mahler’s vast emotional world into sharp, intimate focus.

Earlier in the day, Andrew Ford had delivered a provocative and illuminating lecture, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Serialists?, guiding audiences through the artistic upheaval of early 20th-century Vienna. In that cultural crucible, Mahler’s late works gave way to the radical experiments of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, protégés of Arnold Schoenberg and founders of the Second Viennese School. Ford’s talk offered a timely reminder that Mahler, though steeped in the romantic tradition, was no stranger to dissonance, fragmentation, and emotional extremity, the very qualities that drive the Tenth Symphony.

Castelletti’s scoring, with its vivid detail and translucent textures, drew attention to Mahler’s inner architecture: the halting viola solo, the piercing trumpet calls, the tolling percussion; all rendered with raw vulnerability. The inclusion of accordion, harp, and piano, far from being eccentric, gave the work a dreamlike immediacy, bridging the gap between chamber intimacy and symphonic sweep.

At the heart of it all was James Crabb, whose classical accordion was again a central presence. Though not the arranger of this work, Crabb has shaped much of this year’s festival as both performer and creative force. His playing is more than virtuosic, it is enabling. The classical accordion, in his hands, becomes a flexible spine for chamber ensembles, providing texture, harmonic weight, and rhythmic drive. Many of the most adventurous performances at AFCM 2024 simply wouldn’t have been possible without him.

And yet, for all its ambition and impact, this Mahler 10 did not, for me, quite match the emotional immediacy of last year’s chamber version of Mahler’s First Symphony, an interpretation that felt at once monumental and spontaneous, with a sense of rhythmic lift and structural clarity that proved unforgettable. That said, Mahler 10 offers something entirely different: a glimpse into an unraveling mind, and into the very collapse of a musical world. In that respect, it was unforgettable in its own right.

That sense of farewell, of music aware of its own mortality, echoed earlier in the week, too, in a spellbinding performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. If Mahler’s Tenth is a psychic scream from the precipice, Four Last Songs is its serene counterpart: radiant, accepting, suffused with autumnal grace. To experience both in the same festival is a rare privilege, and a reminder of just how powerfully music can speak across time, between composers, and into the hearts of the living.

As the festival continues into its final days, it’s already clear that AFCM 2025 will be remembered not just for its performances, but for its curatorial daring. Through Ford’s framing, Castelletti’s arrangement, and Crabb’s extraordinary presence, the festival has offered more than just music. It has offered transformation.