Concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

I never had to learn to appreciate classical music. From the time I was old enough to understand it at all I took to it immediately. This was the stuff for me. Still, there are some composers who remain opaque to me, and foremost among them is Gustav Mahler.* I like his First Symphony well enough, but his later works seem to me to be manic-depressive: meandering, incoherent, pompous and self-obsessed, full of emotions that come from nowhere and lead nowhere: music that's literally "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

What Mahler desperately needs is a conductor who can find in his music the large-scale coherent structure that for me is the goal a classical performance should strive for. It's a tough job. Judging by his recordings, Leonard Bernstein couldn't do it. Gilbert Kaplan, self-proclaimed maven of Mahler's Second Symphony, can't do it. I have his recording of the Second, the work of last night's concert. The last time I listened to it, a couple months ago, by the end my exasperation at the work had built to a pitch Mahler's musical climaxes couldn't outdo.

But I'm glad I had that listening, because it gave me a recent benchmark. If anyone can make Mahler speak to me, MTT can. I've attended his performances of some later Mahler works with no breakthroughs, but I thought, "Well, the Second, it's close enough to the First in time and style that maybe ..." And to a large extent last night's concert was what I had hoped for. For the first four of the five movements, particularly the intermezzi second and third, MTT and the SFS made the music entirely convincing. Coherent, logically structured, moments of excitement and of beauty making sense as they succeeded each other ... I was completely won over, and for once felt I really understood what Mahler was saying. The alto Lorraine Hunt Lieberson had full command of the solo song that forms the fourth movement.

The finale is a tougher nut. MTT and crew showed no lessening of their skill and understanding, but that wasn't enough for this lumpen, slapdash movement. It was an extraordinary performance, but even so the sheer badness of the music eventually won out. At least there were some stunning moments on the way, especially in the vocal parts: MTT bringing out the early instrumental appearances of the Resurrection theme ... the solo soprano's voice slowly melting out of the chorus on her first appearance ... the great choral cry of "Was vergangen, auferstehen" (although it goes nowhere: that's Mahler's fault). But by the end of the anticlimactic coda I was tepid again.

Still, when the CD comes out (this performance was one of the series MTT and the orchestra are recording for their Mahler cycle) I intend to buy it. And into the trash with Gilbert Kaplan.

*The other concert repertoire composers I'm most likely to run away from are Richard Strauss and Scriabin, with runners-up for Debussy and the most boring composer in classical history, Max Reger. I haven't failed to notice they're all about the same age and wrote in the same period.

Comments

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

When Zdenek Macal was conducting at Milwaukee, he did some interpretations of Mahler that we thought were first rate. He has recorded Symphonies 5 and 9 with the Prague Symphony, both on the MusicVars label. You can hear samples at the MusicBona web site,
http://www.musicabona.com/macal_zdenek/cd/index.html.en

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Hey, I was driving up Franklin and I saw you walking to the concert! I didn't honk and wave because the traffic pushed me by too fast, but I was thinking "Hello!" very hard.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Hello! Maybe I just got the "hell" part: after all, I was going to Mahler. Probably a good thing you didn't honk: I would have either ignored it or looked around in bafflement.

Mahler concert

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I still get a thrill when I hear that Lorraine Hunt Lieberman is singing somewhere. I remember when she was Lori Hunt, finishing her music degree at San Jose State and playing principal viola in the San Jose Symphony. I had no idea she sang until I went to a friend's master's concert (the concert he put on in partial fulfillment of getting his master's degree). She opened her mouth and my jaw dropped! Wow, what a voice! I was just a freshman at the time but I've never forgotten.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

<A HREF="http://www.sfcv.org/arts_revs/sfsym_6_22_04.php>This review</A> says: "Do not miss her. She may be at the very top of her powers. Like Maureen Forrester in the same repertoire with Bruno Walter a generation ago, hers is a voice that sets the standard, and moves above."