Mahler epic a fitting farewell for Ferrandis
By the time the ruminative finale arrived, everyone was coordinating beautifully.
The Santa Rosa Symphony and Music Director Bruno Ferrandis parted company on Monday, May 7, in the most sweet and appropriate way possible: with words of appreciation and a largely stirring performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
Even though he went on to compose and sketch out extensive parts of an incomplete Tenth Symphony, the Ninth still stands as Mahler’s stirring farewell to the joys and pains of the world. The heart condition that would eventually kill him had already been detected, his marriage was in disarray, and he was no stranger to self-pity even in the best of circumstances.
Ferrandis, fortunately, is departing from Santa Rosa after 11 seasons in a rather less lugubrious fashion. Monday’s concert, the last of three at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, found conductor and orchestra administering a healthy challenge to their communal abilities — the Ninth is notoriously difficult both technically and interpretively — and rising to meet it with increasing assurance.
The French conductor, who next season cedes his baton to Francesco Lecce-Chong, was greeted by a standing ovation as soon as he took the stage, and he opened the proceedings with heartfelt words of thanks to the orchestra’s patrons, donors and musicians. The short first half of the program was devoted to a performance of “Temporis,” a work for cimbalom (the Eastern European hammer dulcimer) by Czech composer Michal Rataj.
But it was the Mahler that both took up the bulk of the evening and conveyed the main expressive impetus of the occasion. From the halting, dissociative opening gesture, which soon melted into a bath of tender lyricism, to the shimmery fade-out of the symphony’s final moments, this felt like a deft summingup of the moment.
That’s not to deny that the demands of this score were often daunting. The strings, especially in the first movement, sounded underpopulated, which allowed the brass to run roughshod over them; the music in the rushing waltz sections of the scherzo tended to trip over its own feet.
Yet the brass playing, for all its aggressive edge, was always beautiful and darkly expressive, which made the boisterous third movement a vivacious stomping ground. And by the time the ruminative finale arrived, everyone was coordinating beautifully — the strings richly upholstered, the woodwind and brass solos decorous and forthright. The last minutes of the symphony made a poignant farewell.
Rataj’s 20-minute score, which featured Jan Mikusek as soloist, turned out to be full of intriguing sonorities, as the orchestra fastened upon individual notes from the cimbalom — a weighty fundamental low note, or a high pitch that drew the trumpet into its orbit — and turned them into material for further exploration.
Still, the overall course of the piece felt dramatically flat. The tempo changed little, and different sections of the piece came and went without much articulation. The most striking aspect was the composer’s inclusion of a stealth vocal part; midway through the piece, Mikusek (who later showed off his vocal abilities with a folk-song encore) began adding sustained notes in a powerful falsetto, leaving audience members to start scanning the stage for the mystery singer.
What was surely true about “Temporis” was that it served as an apt setup for the Mahler to follow — Rataj’s vivid and resourceful use of the orchestra and his moodily expressive palette almost seemed designed to bring the audience into Mahler’s world. And that in turn helped ring down the curtain on Ferrandis’ tenure in a satisfying way.