DCist Goes to the Symphony
The appointment of Christoph Eschenbach to head the National Symphony Orchestra may have had some unintended consequences. As Anne Midgette wondered in the Post yesterday, has the Eschenbach news deflated the significance of the first concerts led by Iván Fischer (pictured) as the NSO's Principal Conductor? Fischer may have felt odd seeing Eschenbach's picture on the marquees outside the Kennedy Center this week — the new Music Director will not actually conduct the orchestra again until 2010 — but fans of Fischer's Mahler, on disc and live with the NSO, filled the Concert Hall last night, to hear him conduct Mahler's third symphony.
The work is a sprawling hundred minutes of music alternately intense and lighthearted, conceived by Mahler in 1895 to follow a program he once described as The Joyous Science: A Summer's Morning Dream. He took that title, which was later dropped, from Nietzsche, whose influential book Also sprach Zarathustra, just published in 1885, provided the lines of the symphony's heart, an emotional ecstasy of self-awakening sung by a contralto in the fourth movement. Fischer's soloist was the German contralto Birgit Remmert, who sang the part in a fine recording of the third symphony by David Zinman in Zurich. She gave a performance quite similar to her recording, guileless and wide-eyed in tone but warmed with earthy loaminess, too. The German diction was rendered clearly but not with affected over-enunciation, with the added advantage of a native speaker's pronunciation. At moments, she lacked a crucial bit of final strength, but overall it was a moving performance.
Mahler began the symphony with a sketch of the fifth movement, a happy-go-lucky setting of a folk poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The voices of the young women of the University of Maryland Concert Choir and the boys and girls of the Children's Chorus of Washington sang the chirpy sacred text and its accompanying clang of bells in a way that was both angelic and charmingly rustic. That they all sang from memory, removing the distraction of turning pages and buried faces, and sat and stood with such quiet uniformity made their contribution all the more convincing. Fischer's interpretation of the symphony was good, but not quite great, in that the whole picture was not fully in focus. He seemed to have emphasized Mahler's description of the third symphony as "an enormous laugh at the whole world." The composer reportedly worried that "its gaiety is not going to be understood or appreciated," and Fischer seemed intent on making that levity understood.
The subtle, rarefied sections of the symphony were spell-binding, like the idyllic off-stage posthorn solo, played superbly by Steven Hendrickson and surrounded a static halo of strings. The first movement, conceived as a triumphal march for the entrance of Pan into a summer bacchanal, was deliberate and martial but not always unified in its forcefulness. There were iridescent violin solos from concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef and the eerie bloom and boom of percussion to sweeten the deal, but the first forty minutes of the symphony, the first movement and parts of the second, left me cold. The third movement, with its frolicking of animals in the many well-played wind solos, felt a little too cutesy, like a Disney cartoon. The tender conclusion of the second movement, where the emphasis was on the light and airy, was a preview of the radiant final movement, which enveloped the ears in a pillowy serenity of string sound, lustrous with dark polish.
This concert will be repeated tonight and Saturday night (October 17 and 18, 8 pm). During the Friday performance only, Maestro Fischer will give introductory comments before each movement, which will likely be an excellent way for a Mahler neophyte to learn something about the third symphony. Those who want to hear the music and nothing but the music should go on Saturday night.