Nézet-Séguin’s Bruckner, Mahler program soars
“Nuts” is a word of variable meaning. One possible definition: finding room for a program of Bruckner and Mahler in the Maison symphonique the day before opening a run of Verdi’s Otello at the Metropolitan Opera.
This was the exploit accomplished by Yannick Nézet-Séguin Sunday afternoon with the Orchestre Métropolitain (an ensemble that itself had managed a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly the evening before). Did I mention that this season-opening concert was recorded by ATMA?
One might suppose such an outing to be at best approximate. Yet here were the vivid attacks, the pregnant pauses and the lofty sonorities of Bruckner’s Second Symphony in the 1877 version, rendered in high definition and with all the lyric flow a hiker through the hills of Upper Austria could hope for.
As in all successful Bruckner performances, technical matters were hard to extricate from expressive aims. But it is worth reporting that the fortissimo triplets for full orchestra in the finale were dazzlingly precise. At the other end of the doingit spectrum resided the sweet sound of the woodwinds in the slow movement and the warm colour everywhere of the strings, which Bruckner interweaves with such a fertile imagination.
This difficult work needs a virtuoso principal horn and trumpet, the former taxed at the end of the Adagio and the latter prominent in the Scherzo. Astride all these particulars was Nézet-Séguin, leading with the economical enthusiasm of a conductor who knows his musicians and knows that they know him. The structure of this potentially diffuse (and rarely heard) 63-minute score was entirely secure. I predict that the recording will enjoy a bigger success than the other instalments in the YNS/OM Bruckner cycle.
Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder as sung by Dorothea Röschmann will not hurt. Some listeners associate Mahler’s songs with bigger and lower voices. (I got to know Um Mitternacht through a recording by Kathleen Ferrier.) Never mind. Röschmann spun the melodies beguilingly and captured all the melancholy of the words. A secure high range in Liebst du um Schönheit was a bonus. The German soprano and the players were negotiating balances in the first song, Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder. No worries: Yannick will be back from New York for a patch session on Tuesday. Nuts.
The concert began with Leopold Stokowski’s plush arrangement of Komm süsser Tod from Bach’s Cantata No. 148. As Nézet-Séguin pointed out in his ample spoken commentary, Stoki was one of his predecessors at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Surely this American ensemble would produce a more impressively solemn performance. I just cannot think of how.