Challenging Mahler a success in the end
Playing Mahler’s symphonies can be made to seem easy enough in the right hands, but the truth is that these are pretty difficult undertakings for any orchestra. The technical challenges in the composer’s intricate instrumental writing are steep enough, and the interpretive problems — as the tone swings from irony to sentimentality and back again — are harder still.
All honor, then, to Donato Cabrera and the musicians of the California Symphony, who tackled the composer’s Fourth Symphony at the orchestra’s season-opening concert in Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts on Sunday afternoon. This was the orchestra’s first Mahlerian outing in nearly 20 years, and if the results were a bit roughand-ready at times, the performance did serve as a testament to the ensemble’s growing ambition.
The Fourth is the most intimately scaled of the composer’s symphonies, a Mozartean chamber work that shines a clear and potentially pitiless spotlight on the performers. It abounds with opportunities to cast a translucent emotional spell, and also to stumble and fall in plain view.
On Sunday, the stumbles were concentrated largely in the expansive first movement, in which Cabrera and the players often struggled to do justice to Mahler’s rich instrumental counterpoint and to negotiate the subtle shifts in tempo that make the movement work.
But things improved thereafter, with an account of the tart second movement that was simultaneously biting and lyrical — concertmaster Jennifer Cho contributed several eloquently shaped violin solos — and a luxuriant, sometimes radiantly beautiful rendition of the expansive slow movement. Soprano Maria Valdes, a recent Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera who has gone on to make a number of impressive appearances on local stages, popped in to deliver the solo in the movement’s finale. It’s a shimmery evocation of the joys of the heavenly afterlife (with the saints and evangelists doing duty as household staff ) and Valdes sang it with unruffled sweetness.
There was a similar vein of tender sentiment in her earlier appearance, opening the program with Samuel Barber’s memory piece “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” With its lilting, cradle-like accompaniments and a misty prose-poetic text by James Agee, “Knoxville” is a work that always teeters close to bathos, but in a performance as pliant and sympathetic as Valdes and the orchestra gave it, the music has a way of sneaking around the listener’s resistance.
In between came a new work from San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey. The title, “YTTE (Yield to Total Elation)” is drawn from the work of the Bay Area outsider artist Achilles Gildo Rizzoli, who used it as a broad rubric for creative expression; in addition to the orchestra, the piece calls for an electroacoustic instrument called an OOVE, the invention of Oliver DiCicco.
Stookey used the OOVE, which apparently causes strings to vibrate using electrical pulses, to create a vague harmonic web at the start of the piece, and the transition from swirling, rumbling potential to actual notes (after the manner of Beethoven’s Ninth or Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”) made a compelling opening gesture.
But there didn’t turn out to be much more to the 25-minute piece after that — a slow-moving series of harmonies, invaded at the halfway point by a terse, chirpy melodic figure in the strings. A burst of stark and almost scary drama rears its head at the very end, as the orchestra and the OOVE get into a bare-knuckles fight about which key to finish up in, but it was a bit late by then.