San Francisco Classical Voice

The attentive audience in Hertz Hall's close quarters was right to sense that something unusual was happening. It's not every day that a young conductor picks Bartók's orchestral spectacular to test her mettle. But Mei-Fang Lin, a young composer of growing credentials, did and she did it well. She took the orchestra through a series of steady and sensible tempi, with a plush, brooding opening yielding flawlessly to the tempestuous Allegro vivace of the first movement, featuring a superb trombone solo and many lovely moments for solo winds to shine.

The moderately paced “Pairs” movement that followed featured some of the best playing of the evening, with solid teamwork and intonation in each of the featured sections. The third movement had only some of the tortured passion that I hoped for, but this elegy was still beautifully done and soared into some aching climaxes. After a nicely lilting allegretto, punctuated by the infamous parody of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and a fine tuba solo, Lin led a fast but unharried finale in which nearly everyone was heard satisfactorily (not always an easy feat with so much furious fiddling and big brass fanfares).

Missing in all the well-rounded sounds and full, confident playing was a little of the tension between folk roots and hypermodern fastidiousness that makes the piece, well, Bartók. The opening was less eerie than calm, the duos in the next movement only intermittently sarcastic, the intermezzo only slightly humorous, and the finale neither vulgar nor bouncy nor clipped where it's necessary to make it swoop and swoon. In general, many notes were just a hair too long and too fleshy for the performance to maintain a bracing edge.

If stylistic subtleties eluded the Bartók piece, the Mahler seemed to benefit from this generalized Romanticism. Under Alexander Kahn, a musicology student who works regularly with the University orchestra — next year he will be an assistant conductor for the Bamberg Symphony in Germany — there was more of the same tendency toward a full sound. Except for some stretches of the first and third movements, the performance had well-shaped and sustained passion. The strings sounded eloquent in the yearning interludes of the finale, and the opening of the second movement was richly done by the basses and celli. On the other hand, the third movement, which started with a superb bass fiddle solo, never took off in the klezmerlike interjections. The winds were only vaguely strident.

The stars of the Mahler performance were the magnificent array of nine horns, who played well from high to low and in their stunning, massed final perorations, the woodsy interjections for pairs and quartets, as well as in the great principal solos in the second movement. Just getting a large section like that together in a summer semester is a challenge, but this was one of the orchestra's many strengths. As in the Bartók, the solo oboe playing was consistently full of character, sonorous, and distinct, and the entire string section seemed to take to every note fearlessly, including some gently graded portamenti.

Kahn's pacing allowed for comfortable transitions and he avoided playing up the careening rubato that can turn this music into a taffy pull. What I did miss was a sense of the exaggerated markings that litter Mahler's score, all the varied accents, and those real “bells-up” sonorities in the winds in which a little cutting edge is necessary. In Hertz, such acoustic techniques are not as necessary for balance. Still, the trumpets, powerful and clear, tended to hijack the balances. I would have liked gradations of tone and volume from the other sections at such moments. The sheer impact of the finale was unforgettable nonetheless. Certainly, the unlikely juxtaposition of vulgarity and cultivation that defines Mahler was hard to avoid. Most shocking of all was that the orchestra laid it out as if nothing could be more routine.