Opening Night for Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's new season
To open its 67th season, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra found a festive balance of the popular, the unusual and the profound, with hit tunes from Wagner’s “Ring” and a rarely-performed version of Beethoven’s majestic Ninth Symphony.
Under conductor Robert Spano, who began his 11th season as music director Thursday in Symphony Hall, the ASO continues to make steady gains both in its connections with the local community and in its national reputation.
After a summer shuttling between various outdoor venues -- and away from the discipline of the concert hall -- the orchestra understandably wasn’t humming at its peak. But a lack of polish was out-weighted by moments of luminous beauty and the sort of intensity these musicians have become known for.
First, of course, we stood for the National Anthem, with Spano conducting the audience and with the 200 or so ASO choristers, in formal attire, filling the aisles. Together we were magnificent -- singing in tune, with a focused vibrato and at such loud volume that only the burly low brass and Charles Settle’s cymbal crashes could be heard from the stage.
Spano conducted a program of Wagner excerpts back in 2005, just before his debut in the complete “Ring” at the Seattle Opera. His naïve approach then was to make “Ride of the Walkyries” and the “Immolation Scene” into abstract concert music.
Two Seattle “Ring” cycles later, Spano now leads the music as three-dimensional theater. There is shape and meaning. He brought out verdant nature in “Seigfried’s Death and Funeral March,” sculpting the ideas as much as balancing the instruments of the orchestra. There’s still much more work for Spano till his Wagner is rich enough -- deep enough -- to stand at the highest level. But he’s making the effort.
In the “Immolation Scene,” dramatic soprano Christine Brewer sang the final thoughts from the opera as Brünnhilde, perhaps the most maligned and noble female character in all of opera. The text might read like a country-western ballade of a scorned wife’s rage: she sings of her husband’s infidelity and contemplates acts of arson, patricide, suicide and -- she’s really angry -- global apocalypse. Only her loyal horse arouses tender feelings.
Brewer’s soprano is an instrument of rare luxury and power, at once silken, roaring, luminous. Although she’s never sung Brünnhilde on an opera stage, she can vocalize the role as well as the great Wagnerians from legend. Yet her characterization came off as shallow. Beautifully sung, but without intense personality, without inner feeling.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from 1824, was performed here in a quirky edition prepared by the great conductor and composer Gustav Mahler about a century ago. Unless you know the original score well, you might not notice the changes. It was Mahler’s attempt to get at the essence of Beethoven for his time and culture, although to our ears, accustomed to stripped down “historically informed” performances, it sounded upholstered and varnished -- less dangerous than we know it to be.
Pierre Ruhe is classical music critic of artscriticatl.com.
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. 8 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org
