CSO Fanfare Sidebar: James Gaffigan
By Ken Smith
Originally published in the 2021 Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra program book
Any queries about James Gaffigan’s pairing of Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with Johann Baptist Georg Neruda’s rarely performed Trumpet Concerto in E flat (November 19-20) should start with the evening’s soloists, soprano Catherine Trottmann and CSO Principal Trumpet Robert Sullivan. “The two things I love most in life are music and people,” says Gaffigan, “and I never really know how to separate the two.”
Gaffigan first heard Trottmann while rehearsing a mid-pandemic production of La Traviata at the Paris Opera in November 2020. Paris went into another lockdown before opening night, cancelling the entire run, but Gaffigan remained captivated. “She was singing Flora and I didn’t even notice her until she opened her mouth in the opening scene,” he says. “It was, like, who is this girl and why is she singing such a small role?”
Bigger roles had actually started coming already, it turned out, but Trottmann had remained devoted to her prior commitments. Gaffigan’s inner ear immediately connected her voice with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. “I asked her, ‘Have you ever sung Mahler Four?’” he recalls. “She said, ‘Funny you should ask.’” Both of her scheduled performances of the piece last season had been cancelled.
“Catherine’s voice has a childlike quality, but it’s also huge,” says Gaffigan. ”If you cast a boy, or a soprano who sounds like a boy, you’ll never hear them above the orchestra. Nor will they probably have the emotional depth. Catherine has this angelic quality, but also the sheer volume and the right level of musicianship.”
Soprano Catherine Trottmann (Photo Credit: Cincinnati Symphony)
Gaffigan’s relationship with Sullivan, by contrast, stretches back to the Cleveland Orchestra in the early 2000s, when Sullivan was Assistant Principal Trumpet and Gaffigan was Assistant Conductor. Gaffigan soon became enamored by Sullivan’s musicianship and his advocacy of living composers. “We first explored several pieces that had already been written for him,” he says. “Then we thought about doing something baroque, perhaps even including Catherine in parts of a Bach cantata. But that wasn’t really enough to showcase Robert.”
Neruda’s E-flat Concerto became a perfect balance. “I love thematic programming, but this became more about balancing musical styles. Neruda whets the appetite for Mahler, particularly the symphony’s trumpet fanfare. We usually think of the trumpet as the voice of god; Mahler’s music is sacred in a very different way, but it definitely speaks to the human condition.
CSO Principal Trumpet Robert Sullivan (Photo Credit: Cincinnati Symphony)
“The Fourth is my favorite Mahler symphony,” Gaffigan continues. “It’s the most human, and tells a story from beginning to end with a relatively small orchestra by Mahler’s standards. You have extreme romanticism looking back at more traditional forms, with all the bells and whistles—literally sleigh bells in this case—of Mahler’s most advanced orchestration.
“It’s sad, but sometimes you need a funeral to remind you how beautiful a piece of music is,” Gaffigan maintains. “After the pandemic, something so pure as Mahler’s music when the little child sings about ‘the music in heaven’ in the fourth movement is simply heartbreaking. This is the perfect piece to bring us back to the symphonic world. If it doesn’t strike a nerve, you should probably check your pulse.”
