By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
Benjamin Zander has become one of the major Mahlerians of the day. Telarc has just issued his recording of the Third Symphony with London's Philharmonia Orchestra, the fifth release in an ongoing cycle. He is also in a season-long “Mahler Journey” with his home orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic, which brought him to the Second Symphony in Symphony Hall Wednesday night — a performance he and the Philharmonic will take to Carnegie Hall on Feb. 29.
Wednesday night's performance traced a profound emotional journey from grief and despair and human confusion through funeral rites, marches, peasant dances, grotesquerie, and terror to triumphant affirmation. The Philharmonic sounded splendid in Symphony Hall, and some of the solo playing by oboist Peggy Pearson, trumpeter Jeffrey Work, flutist Kathleen Boyd, trombonist Don C. Davis, and others was on the highest level.
The Chorus Pro Musica began collaborating with Zander in the 1980s when Donald Palumbo was its music director. Since then Palumbo has earned international prominence as chorus master of the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Salzburg Festival. He returned for this event, and his singers sounded confident and idiomatic across the wide dynamic range of the music. Susan Platts boasts a sumptuous contralto, but tonal quality and even intonation flickered in and out of focus; still, the best she had to offer was something to cherish. Ilana Davidson traced her soprano lines with silver.
It was hardly Zander's fault that the Symphony Hall organ is being restored, so he had to use an electronic instrument that sounded like an outboard motor. But his gift is to keep a performance alert, alive, and fully present in every moment, as Mahler's music requires; the music ran along the nerves.
An ancillary event, Zander's performance of the Ninth Symphony with the New England Conservatory Philharmonia last week, was less successful. The conductor held a firm grasp on the musical and emotional issues, and there was some superior solo playing from, among others, concertmaster Gabriela Diaz, violist Boris Vayner, flutist Sarah Tiedemann, bassoonist Matthew Lano, contrabassoonist Andrew Heinrich, horn Erin Koertge, and tympanist Gregory Cohen. The entire orchestra played with impressive commitment and stamina.
But some technical issues interfered with full realization of Zander's intentions, and Mahler's. Much of the 30-minute first movement was so out of tune and so not together that it was painful to hear — and not in the sense that Mahler meant this music to be excruciating. Problems of this nature continued to appear throughout the work. It is impossible to depart purposefully from many of the basic standards and disciplines of orchestral playing before you have taken the trouble to master them.
by KEITH POWERS
Boston Philharmonic, conducted by Benjamin Zander, at Symphony Hall, last night; repeats Sunday.
Mahler set out to save mankind with his 2nd symphony. And he might have done it. The Boston Philharmonic, with Benjamin Zander conducting, showed us what it was all about last night at Symphony Hall.
This concert-goer's appreciation of Mahler does not include a half-hour of spoken introduction, but Zander's sponsors have decided that they like the notion, and Zander himself is never shy in front of a microphone.
His comments did help those listeners who were unaware that they faced 80 minutes of shape-changing music: “Bear with us while we bring the others up to speed,” Zander said.
The music speaks for itself. Mahler intended his 2nd to be grandiose in the best sense, an extravaganza of noise and high— minded lyrics. It's set for the largest ensemble imaginable at the time — chorus, two soloists, an orchestra of 115 players — “twice the resources Beethoven used in his 9th,” Zander pointed out. Horns and drums play from offstage. Soloists blend seamlessly with chorus and band.
There was much to like. Zander's Phil may be a largely student band, but he knows how to teach, and while the performance might have been more practiced than polished, still the playing was intelligent. Of the soloists, Ilana Davidson stood out with her heartfelt interpretation and spot-on reading. Jeffrey Rink's Chorus pro Musica, which had to sit for ages before entering with the softest tones, still managed to make art.
But mainly it was Zander's passion, and his ability to teach it to his young ensemble, that made this reading of Mahler's Resurrection do what it should: change us.
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
I dug up my review of Benjamin Zander's first performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) with the Boston Philharmonic — 22 years ago at Symphony Hall. “This was not a respectable performance,” I wrote. “It was a great one.” I wanted to read what I'd written then, because Zander's performance of the Mahler Second at Symphony Hall last week, with some of the same personnel (the Chorus pro Musica under the direction of Donald Palumbo, now chorus master of the Chicago Lyric Opera, and Martha Moor playing harp), left me baffled. The orchestra is now much stronger. And the chorus, which enters in the last movement, like the chorus in the Beethoven Ninth, was again glorious. In 1982, I was overwhelmed by Zander's sense of Mahler's personal psychological turmoil, as opposed to the magnificent single-minded, im-personal communal spirit of the now legendary 1979 performance by Claudio Abbado with the Boston Symphony. I praised the way Zander conveyed Mahler's “multiple pulls": forward, through his use of portamento (a carrying forward), transporting the music beyond death to ultimate resurrection; and backward, through rubato (a holding back), reluctant to let go of the things of this world. These opposite impulses created in every phrase a drama of psychological tensions that found release only at the very end.
I didn't feel these simultaneous pulls last week.
Not that the performance wasn't impressive. The Boston Philharmonic sounded quite splendid in Symphony Hall. The strings were unified, though it was disappointing to have first and second violins on the same side of the stage when only the week before, in Zander's performance of the Mahler Ninth with the New England Conservatory's Philharmonia Orchestra, they'd been divided, as they were in Mahler's time. The brasses were extremely musical, especially in the haunting episodes when they're playing off stage, but even at extremely loud volumes. And the winds were prismatically colorful (Peggy Pearson the exceptional principal oboist).
And yet, preceded by Zander's half-hour lecture demonstration, with the orchestra playing examples, the symphony seemed more like an extension of the demonstration. Zander's earlier performances (were they the ones before he started giving his own pre-concert lectures§) felt riskier, more like direct confrontations with experience, the audience participating in a process of discovery along with the orchestra. “Quest” is the root of “questioning.” That quest for meaning was something that made Zander's Mahler so special. Maybe he's now beyond the discovery stage. To make major-label (Telarc) recordings with London's Philharmonia Orchestra, maybe he's had to have more answers than questions. Or maybe the teacherly instincts of his pre-concert talks are interfering with his instincts as an artist.
In 1982, the alto soloist in the fourth-movement “Urlicht” ("Primal Light"), the symphony's first glimpse of Heaven, was Jane Struss, with whom Zander has had a unique and long-standing musical partnership (she'll end this season's “Mahler Journey,” April 29 and May 1 and 2, with Mahler's great Rückert song “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” — “I have become lost to the world"). Both Zander and Struss seemed to have an uncanny simultaneous intuition about the fundamental nature of Mahler — a “vision” that made their performances so different from Mahler-as-usual: more inward, more truly psychological, more felt from moment to moment. Struss's heavenly octave leap (on “Himmel” — “Heaven") provided a musical body for the rising soul (a friend described it as a kind of mysterious “falling upward"). When in the last movement she sang “O glaube, mein Herz” — “Believe, my heart!” — she communicated a desperate yearning, a need, even a warning. Everything was at stake.
This short movement has to consolidate everything that comes before — it can't afford to be only about hitting the notes. The singer this time was Susan Platts, a young Canadian contralto with a big, warm voice and palpable musical intelligence. She's sung a lot of Mahler, and she has the right vocal weight and color. It was a little unsettling that she occasionally slipped below the pitch. But the real problem was how little urgency she conveyed. That octave leap was hardly an event, hardly even a leap. “O glaube” didn't begin to suggest the intense conflict behind this request. Soprano Ilana Davidson had more urgency, but her bright voice didn't blend well with Platts's rounder sound. Only the chorus and some of the solo players made me feel they were living through this, not just delivering information.
I didn't feel much emotion in most of the playing, only the externalizations of emotion: vigorous contrasts between loud and soft, fast (sometimes too fast) and slow, refined and deliberately coarse playing. Where was the inner struggle — and tenderness — once so piercingly embedded in every phrase? I joined the ovation that greeted the end. Professional performances aren't often this good. But the very things I admire most about Zander performances were missing. Last November, the BPO and guest soloist Mitsuko Shirai finally blossomed in their third performance. Maybe this Mahler Second was also a performance shy of fulfilling its potential.