It was a grand celebration Saturday night at the Terrace Theater of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, where the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra opened its 2011-2012 season – the 11th under maestro Enrique Arturo Diemecke – with a tribute to Gustav Mahler on the 100th anniversary of his death.
Probably the only one who would have been disappointed was Mahler himself.
This is a banner year for Mahler, the composer and conductor whose symphonies were pretty much ignored during his life, but were rediscovered some 50 years later by numerous orchestras. Indeed, Diemecke went Sunday from Long Beach to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he is leading the orchestra there in a 20-concert Mahler tribute that includes all of his symphonies and which will be televised and recorded.
Here, though, at the first in the six-concert season called «Vienna Nights» – because it highlights composers with a Viennese connection (Mahler was conductor of the Vienna Symphony for many years) – Diemecke bracketed five songs by Mahler, called the «Rückert Lieder,» with a work by Wagner and a symphony by Tchaikovsky.
The songs clearly were not the highlight of the evening, or even, to be honest, more than a trifle from the very large Mahler canon. Sung by mezzo-soprano Barbara Dever, they were often surprisingly elegant, sometimes a little like Broadway show tunes (at least in one brief trill), but never very compelling.
Dever sang with as much passion as she could muster, and was often effective, although her articulation seemed a bit less than perfect. But the songs themselves, set to five poems by the poet Friedrich Rückert, who also wrote the poems used by Mahler in his «Kindertotenlieder» («Songs on the Death of Children»), are less emotionally involving than their more somber brothers, and less focused, on five different but sometimes related subjects.
The Rückert songs are not among the composer’s best works musically or emotionally. They would be an interesting part of a larger Mahler program, but by themselves, as the centerpiece of a concert tribute to the composer, they seemed less than satisfying.
And Dever, who managed the first four with charm, was drowned out at one point in «Um Mitternacht,» perhaps the best of the five. Mahler would have wanted much more.
The evening opened, after the traditional «The Star-Spangled Banner,» with Wagner’s «Prelude and Liebestod» from his opera «Tristan und Isolde,» a tribute to Mahler the conductor’s continued championing of Wagner’s operas. As a conductor, Mahler was world famous and influential during his career, a Mozart champion as well as a Wagnerian.
Diemecke gave it a reading of supreme delicacy in the first half of the work, with every pianissimo passage played at a whisper, with delicate regard for the brooding atmosphere he was creating. When the music began to shine with the passion of love, with the deep, resonant chords for which it is famous, Diemecke was able to keep the passion in hand: He never went over the top and kept the reading, even in its most passionate moments, subtle and controlled.
The Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony, which closed the program, was another tribute to Mahler the conductor: He was an enthusiastic supporter of that composer as well. Diemecke ended the concert with a brilliant and lively performance of the piece – from the big brass chords of the opening movement, through the pizzicato brilliance of the symphony’s fourth movement, to the heroically dynamic final movement full of power and rhythmic flourish.
As is often his way, Diemecke saved the big work for the finale, and the audience responded twice, once at the end of the first movement when spontaneous applause burst out despite Diemecke’s disapproval (sometimes audiences just can’t help themselves) and again at the symphony’s end, which got a unanimous three-time repeated standing ovation.
The final movement involved all orchestral forces, but one standout (who usually doesn’t have such a workout) was Danielle Squires on the cymbals: a very important part of the symphony’s ending.
John Farrell is a Long Beach freelance writer. More of his articles can be read at http://byjohnfarrell.typepad.com.