DeYoung shines, but NACO too timid
Brahms and Wagner at NACO Reviewed Wednesday night At the NAC’s Southam Hall
Wagner and Brahms aren’t the first composers people associate with the NAC Orchestra.
The band’s smaller size and more diaphanous sound make it less than ideal for those two titans of German Romanticism. Brahms, in particular, has not featured on Pinchas Zukerman’s programming as frequently as other stalwarts, but the maestro seems to want to make up for it in his final season.
Wednesday’s program, which repeated Thursday night, featured U.S. mezzo Michelle DeYoung singing Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and the alto aria Erbarme dich from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and Brahms’ Symphony No. 4. DeYoung has a voice and a half: a flexible, impeccably produced instrument with a beefy tone, extravagant colour and thrilling power. Her broad vibrato may not be to everyone’s taste; there’s more stretch here than spin. But if it’s not a pretty voice, it’s something increasingly rare: an exciting one.
Around the time he was working on his opera Tristan und Isolde, Wagner set to music five treacly, amateurish poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy patron. She and the married Wagner may or may not have been having an affair, but the Wesendonck Lieder are unmistakably love songs, passionate precursors to the daring, sensual chromaticism of Tristan.
DeYoung was in her element in these pieces, singing them with a glorious sense of line and crafting each one like a self-contained opera scene.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Zukerman and the musicians. They could not match DeYoung’s sense of drama and urgency, and at times it felt like she was towing the whole orchestra behind her. The sound was timid and tentative, with no weight behind those juicy Wagnerian chords.
DeYoung was less happily suited to the Bach, taken at an old-fashioned, dragging tempo, with Zukerman playing a heavyhanded violin obbligato.
As a violinist, Zukerman is a plush, plummy interpreter of Brahms’ solo and chamber works. Conducting the composer’s last symphony, he lacked the stonemason’s discipline needed to chisel clarity out of the work’s ambitious architecture, Brahms’ tribute to music history before him. Phrasing was utilitarian; counterpoint went unenhanced; crescendos climaxed too early, leaving nowhere to build to. The balance between sections in the opening movement seemed off — all about the bass — while the vast unfolding of variations in the last one was disjointed and frantic.
The Brahms was being recorded for a future release that will also include the Brahms Double Concerto programmed for later this season. As one of the last recordings Zukerman makes with NACO, it’s too bad the performance wasn’t more inspired.