San Francisco Classical Voice

Taking the monster by the horns, conductor Michael Morgan chose to close the Oakland East Bay Symphony's season with Mahler's massive Sixth Symphony. That might well seem an unlikely thing to do; but as it turned out, the performance drew a very large audience to the Paramount Theater who gave the performance an equally massive standing ovation. And with good cause, for it proved a finely wrought and adroit performance.

There's something about the Mahler's Sixth which engenders odd couplings. I remember a New York performance when Dimitri Mitropoulos closed the concert with the dances from Falla's Three-Cornered Hat. And then there was Simon Rattle's San Francisco Symphony performance when he opened with Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. Morgan's choice was no less curious: Debussy's genteel Danses sacrée et profane for harp and string orchestra. It too received a splendid performance, highlighted by the dulcet harp soloist Natalie Cox.

Cox, the orchestra's principal since 1988, played the Debussy with enormous finesse, warmth and appropriate restraint. Her playing was largely free of percussive plucking, other than for the little pixy arabesques near the close of the first dance. Her consistent control of timbre was beauteous and with a keen sensibility to rhythmic values rarely encountered from harpists and guitarists. To this add Morgan providing a velvety cushion of string tone behind Cox, again a thing of elegant warmth free of sentimentality.

The two dances come as close to Satie as Debussy got, especially in their quasi-antique mannerisms. The first slow dance is one of those pastiche-like gestures toward an imaginary classical Greece. That is followed by a second dance which amounts to no more than a rather pretty salon waltz — which points to a semantic problem in the usual translation of the title as "Sacred and Profane Dances". That suggests a religious piece followed by something which involves profanity. Strictly speaking, the traditional translation of the title into English is "correct." But it conveys the wrong concept. "Sacred and secular" would be better. But let that pass.

Mahler's symphonies fall into three categories. There are the first five basically affirmative symphonies, capped by the pivotal Fifth. Then come the beginnings of subtle but important changes, with the three more experimental problem children, Nos. 6-8, all of which suffer from weak finales and extensive funerary moods first experienced during the opening of the Fifth Symphony. From the Sixth onward, even the scherzos sound menacing rather than charming. It was an unprecedented touch for its day.

And then there are the three crown jewels of the Mahler eleven. That, of course, assumes that you accept the subtitle of Das Lied von der Erde as "A Symphony for Voices and Orchestra" as well as the unfinished Tenth. One ends up with nine, ten or eleven, depending on how you care to look at them.

With the Sixth, there's something of the new interest in contrapuntal writing, more basic instrumental coloration and more dissonant harmonies. Mahler's Sixth also began the exploration of unusual and even bizarre instruments: cow bells, celeste, and a "hammer" in the finale. No one has ever quite figured just what that kind of hammer was intended, or what it is supposed to strike. (Oakland's Ward Spangler built a large wooden resonating box, which he struck with a large plank. Good!)

Standard instruments which were merely part of the general texture in the early symphonies began increasingly to emerge as important features in the later ones. For instance, you rarely notice the tuba as a singular instrument in the first five symphonies. It's just there, reinforcing the brass section. In the Sixth, it stands out during brief mournful solos. (And with the Sixth, Seventh and "Das Lied," the harp is augmented by a very noticeable mandolin.) The expected solos had always been there — the concertmaster, oboe, horn, etc. But the later symphonies began probing odd colors for their own sake. That partly accounts for Deryck Cooke making a second performance version of Mahler's Tenth. The first was too much like the early symphonies. The revision adheres more closely to the later style.

While none of Mahler is easy to perform, the Sixth is especially difficult on the conductor as well as the orchestra. Intense emotional outbursts sometimes sit cheek by jowl with standard melodic "effects" bordering the trite. The first three movements of the Sixth, for instance, are superb achievements, and the opening and closing of the finale are startling. For me at least, the third movement represents Mahler's most beautiful, strongest slow movement. But in between the opening and closing of the finale there is much that sounds like shallow military clichés, including a musical imitation of a cavalry charge.

Pulling all that into unity and pacing the piece presents serious problem, intensified by the work's great length. (The Sixth takes about an hour and a quarter, unless you play it really well, and then it's about 80 minutes.) It's no accident that several of the classic Mahler specialists like Bruno Walter and Klemperer tended to avoid the Sixth — and indeed, the Seventh and Eighth as well. It's in the final three symphonies that Mahler seems to have found what he'd been searching for so ardently.

Morgan had the measure of the piece, holding the thing firmly in line as he pointed the music toward the final pages. The orchestra played passionately throughout, maintaining the level of tension even through the few light moments such as the brief minute that serves as Trio in the Scherzo. Little problems turned up here or there in the high string intonation, but nothing which could mar a generally excellent presentation.

My one serious complaint lies with the quasi-lectures before the music, one each from the orchestra's manager as a commercial for next season, and a shorter one from Morgan. It's getting to be like a communicative disease spreading through East Bay orchestras. If they simply must speak to the audience, then brevity is advisable. Lectures are just so many lead balloons which irritate more than they inform.

(Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.)

©2002 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved