Daniele Gatti, Staatskapelle Dresden, Mahler’s Fifth

Tonight, for the first time in my life, I cried at a concert.
There’s really no way to describe in words what Staatskapelle Dresden, under Daniele Gatti, did with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—how they seemed not to perform it, but to breathe it, to live inside it. How Gatti let the music pass entirely through himself (and one wonders how he survives that), how every curve of the form—in timing, in sound, in silence—was balanced with extraordinary precision, and yet framed by overwhelming emotion and almost unbearable kind.

Imagine old Dresden porcelain: delicate, crisscrossed with invisible cracks that, under the right light, reveal a whole map of human vulnerability. That was Mahler’s Fifth in this performance—fragile, a little embarrassed by its own grandeur, naked to the point of pain.

Gatti conducted without a score, and every gesture carried discoveries. The opening march came across as the creak of worn shoes on cobblestones, while the trumpets spoke less of triumph than of a raw, almost desperate cry. By refusing the usual gloss, Gatti uncovered what is often hidden in Mahler: defenselessness, even awkwardness. It was like looking at an Egon Schiele drawing—figures twisted, lines trembling, nothing smooth or polished. And in those irregularities lay the truth: that Mahler, neurotic and exposed, was writing not a monument but a self-portrait.

The second movement tore itself open, reminding us that music is not a system of coordinates but a notebook ripped apart, every page in a different hand. The Scherzo had a sly grin: the cellos danced with a kind of moustached swagger, while the horns argued with themselves. It felt like a Fellini carnival, forever teetering between grotesque humor and melancholy.

The Adagietto refused the cliché of the “eternal flower on the grave.” The harps and strings did not sob; instead, they tested the air gently, as if to see whether one more note—or our own fragile consciousness—could possibly hold.

And the finale? A sudden reconciliation with chaos. Everything spun like an old gramophone record: joyful, yes, but with the constant risk that the needle might slip.

This was orchestral playing of filigree detail, every crack exposed. A silence so fragile that any sound might be the last. Mahler’s Fifth emerged as a story of two musics — the monumental and the human—forever stumbling into each other. And in those collisions, something miraculous appeared: a trembling pencil line on the margin of the score.

Staatskapelle Dresden play as if their sound carried the sediment of centuries: dense, weighty, dusted with a noble patina of time. And in Bucharest, at the George Enescu International Festival, they brought their very first-tier lineup—the giants, the venerable old guard. But Gatti treated that sound as Italian craftsmen treat old marble: he wiped it clean, just enough to let the living surface breathe. In a single gesture he can combine control with detachment, conjure an entire world and yet leave room for imperfection. He trusts the pauses as much as the notes.

And still, words fall short. You had to be there—to feel it, to hear it, to be undone by it. For me, it has become part of my life now, unerasable.

“Nothing better can ever be heard,” I told Maestro Gatti afterward. “I honestly don’t know what to do with myself now.”
“Go to a good restaurant,” he replied with a smile.
What restaurant after music like that, I thought.
And yet my colleague and I did go—Italian, naturally.
We drank red Italian wine to the health of Daniele Gatti.