Concert Review                             

 

Pacific Symphony celebrates Mahler centennial with a gripping Ninth

By Truman Wang
November 17, 2011

   Pacific Symphony

Mahler:

3 songs from Ruckert-Lieder
Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D Major

Carl St. Clair, conductor
Christopheren Nomura, baritone
Hye-Young Kim, piano
Joseph Horowitz, artistic advisor

Thursday, Nov 17, 2011 at Renée and Henry
Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, Calif.

D

uring this centennial year of Mahler’s death, the Austrian composer’s music has been performed all over the world in a totality of commitment and comprehensiveness that would have been unthinkable when Leonard Bernstein first attempted to introduce Mahler to the world in the 1950’s. How time has changed! Or, as Lenny put it best, "His time has come". In Orange County, the ever-enterprising Pacific Symphony put on an elaborate multimedia show chronicling Mahler's life events around the time of the Ninth Symphony. It started with a dramatic reading of the book "Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife" by professional actors, in lieu of the usual pre-concert lecture. Then, in the three Rückert-Lieder, photos of Mahler were projected overhead, including a morbid death mask during the final song about farewell and leave-taking. The well turned-out crowd for this concert, along with two others featuring the last symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Bruckner, suggested that death could be good business.

Extra-musical content aside, the concert was a huge success musically. In the touching rendition of the Rückert-Lieder, we heard Christopheren Nomura’s soulful baritone gently intoned the mysteries of midnight air (“Un Mitternacht”), the gentle fragrance of a Linden tree (“Ich atmet einen Linden Duft”), and rising to the height of pathos in the final song (“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”). So carefully and scrupulously were the songs prepared that one wished Mr. Nomura had performed all five songs instead of just three. Pianist Hye-Young Kim provided nuanced accompaniment, matching the soloist in mood as well as poetry.

Alban Berg described the first movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony as "permeated by the premonition of death". Under conductor Carl St. Clair’s baton, death's unnerving presence was keenly felt. In the first movement (“Andante comodo”), Maestro St. Clair’s propulsive tempi generated a feeling of breathless terror and the sense of dread was palpable in quiet passages as well. The Ländler-like second movement was also vividly characterized, with sharply pointed rhythms, cheeky woodwinds and some memorably gutsy playing from the Pacific Symphony horns. The third movement, Rondo-Burleske, also had plenty of thrust. The performance came to an apotheosis in the celebrated Adagio finale. Maestro St. Clair kept the tempo flowing forward in grand, ecstatic waves (a Mahlerian ‘liebestod’!) leading up to the cymbal-capping climax. It was an absorbing and gripping performance of Mahler’s farewell to the world.

If I have only one gripe, it was the inappropriate applauses by the Orange County audiences who, through the fine pre-concert educational presentation that precedes each concert, have learned pitifully nothing about classical concert-going etiquettes. Surely, someone at the Pacific Symphony’s education department can do better.
 

To purchase tickets for the Pacific Symphony's 2011/12 season, call (714)755-5799 or visit online www.pacificsymphony.org



 

   

Truman C. Wang is editor-in-chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Pasadena Star-News, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily.

 

 

 

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