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Mahler Resurrection Symphony opens ASO season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
8 tonight and Saturday. $10-$53 Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. NE. 404-733-5000
Although Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus turned their opening night concert —- the ASO’s 61st, Spano’s fourth as music director —- into a memorial for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the mood Thursday in Symphony Hall was brimming with celebration.
Some of it was eerily familiar. As in 2001, when Spano took charge of the ASO just days after the September 11 attacks, the Red Cross was on hand collecting donations. And again the program dwelled on emotionally turbulent and substantive music —- on this night it was Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, which the composer subtitled “Resurrection.”
The evening started, as opening nights do, with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed as a sing-along in the plump, Mahlerian-sounding version by Walter Damrosch. A man at the back of the hall then yelled, “Bravo Spano!” and many members of the chorus applauded —- an acknowledgment of substantial artistic gains made in the past few years, both for the conductor and the 300 or so musicians on stage.
Spano gave his vociferous fans a dignified brush-off, of course, instead describing to the audience how the message of Mahler’s music is “fundamentally one of hope, even in the face of death.” With those words in mind, the gritty cello and bass funeral march that opens the symphony sounded especially savage and raw. When musicians have a powerful story to tell, it doesn’t matter so much when the orchestra sounds woolly and inexact, which is the legacy of summers spent in the artistic doldrums of Chastain Park.
Spano invigorated the music, but the symphony felt a few degrees short of the boiling point. My own take is that Spano hasn’t yet thrown his interpretive weight where, for him, it inevitably needs to go.
It’s a simplification, but two basic schools of Mahler interpretation have evolved over the past century. One is cool objectivity, typified by conductors from Pierre Boulez to Yoel Levi. The other, over-the-top extreme came from Lenny Bernstein’s put-me-out-of-my-misery/I’m-in-love approach. In this Mahler 2, Spano threaded between the poles, never quite opening up moments he’d set up to be confessional or even revelatory.
In the opening movement’s descent to the Molto Pesante, where a conductor hangs the full orchestra from the tip of his baton, Spano never shook it enough to yield a head-spinning, goose bump moment.
Elsewhere the playing did give chills —- as in the folk dances of the second and third movements. Properly macabre, the music here made a listener think of those New Orleans bars where patrons continued to guzzle $1 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon even as they stood in a foot of fetid water: Party on till Judgment Day. That was precisely the effect Mahler was after —- and the orchestra caught it.
In the final section, the ASO Chorus entered with perfectly hushed, perfectly anguished singing —- as ever, the best symphonic chorus in the land. The two vocal soloists, mezzo Nancy Maultsby and soprano Twyla Robinson, sang with warmth and clarity in their brief solos.
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By Bruce McN
September 16, 2005 12:46 PM | Link to this
Yet another snide attack on Maestro Yoel Levi, whose Mahler brought tears to Atlanta audiences. Next time I’ll stay home and listen to the ASO on Mr. Levi’s magnificent CDs.