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Epic Mozart and Pretty Faure from ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats just once, Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000.
Bernard Labadie is back in town, and that’s good news. His concert Thursday, guest conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, offered one pleasure after another — till he made it all seem easy.
A Canadian, the conductor specializes in baroque and classical-era music, fusing so-called “historically informed” performance practice with the natural strengths of modern-instrument ensembles, like the ASO or his own Quebec-based Violons du Roy. His last two Atlanta visits, with these two ensembles, linger in the memory. With the ASO two years ago, he delivered enlightened, vital, substantive readings of Bach and Handel. With his own band, last season at Spivey Hall, he touched on the sublime in music from French baroque operas.
He achieved almost as strong a result Thursday in Symphony Hall in Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, the composer’s last and, if not his wittiest or freshest, his most epic symphony.
The ASO violins — split on either side of the stage, following 18th century custom — were a bit straggly in the brisk, surprise-a-second opening movement, although Labadie’s tempos weren’t especially fast. Nevertheless, the orchestra sounded juicy and flavorful. The minuet nimbly danced on its toes, all air and light and joy. The symphony’s finale was most impressive: the orchestra intensified the mood without thickening the sound, so even when Mozart stacks up the themes at the end, every voice was clear and meaningful.
Like a solicitor general arguing a winning case before the supreme court, Labadie’s musical rhetoric in the Mozart was expertly delineated, his logic airtight, built up phrase by inescapable phrase. Musicians have complained that Labadie is a taskmaster and, in reheasal, a micro-manager. He might complicate musicians’ lives, but for the listener he consistently gets highly musical results.
After intermission came music that goes down like a glass of warm milk at bedtime.
Gabriel Faure’s “Pavane,” in a needless arrangement for orchestra and chorus, sets the loveliest of pastoral tunes and adds flirty-shepherdess doggerel verse. The ASO Chorus, prepared by Norman Mackenzie, sang it for all it was worth.
Then came Faure’s beloved Requiem, premiered (in a slimmer version than heard Thursday) in 1888. The composer, an organist and choirmaster at La Madeleine in Paris, was said to have been a modest, kind man and agnostic of faith. As a mass for the dead, his Requiem’s subject is ostensibly the passing of the soul from one world to another, set within the French Catholic liturgy.
Yet in Thursday evening’s context, linked to no particular event or commemoration, it came off as just a pretty piece of choral music.
Really pretty. Depite the harsh words in the “Offertory,” of infernal punishment and souls swallowed up by the abyss, the choir gets to sing warmly consonant, comforting music.
The fourth movement, “Pie Jesu,” has become a stand-alone pop standard, crooned by the likes of Tom Waits, Rod Stewart and Charlotte Church, before the cherubic teen angel got lost in cigarettes, booze and cheeseburgers.
Soprano Karina Gauvin sang it here with disarming elegance, although the voice itself isn’t especially endearing. Baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson was equally capable and rather handsome in tone.
If Faure’s making a point here, it seems not so much that the afterlife is a welcoming place as that the real beauty is right here on earth, right now, all around us. In Labadie and the ASO’s performance, they made it so.
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