Trumpeter Michael Tiscione, conductor Peter Oundjian and pianist Inon Barnatan at Thursday’s ASO live performance. (Photographs by Rand Traces)
For a season that noticed the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra tackling eight of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies and all of the raging fury they comprise, Thursday’s live performance was the orchestra ending the season not with a bang however a contented sigh. The ASO closes out its 2024-25 season with Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, op. 35, by Dmitri Shostakovich and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E minor (Music of the Night time). There’s yet another efficiency on Saturday, June 7.
The Shostakovich concerto opened the evening and proved to be the night’s excessive level. Shostakovich is a composer who is aware of the way to lean into the silky clean, jazz age panache that was standard in his day with out abandoning the structural depth of his classical predecessors like Brahms and Beethoven. This makes him a type of considering man’s George Gershwin: poppy however nonetheless deep nonetheless. He might not have something in his catalog that’s as suffocatingly overplayed as Rhapsody in Blue (arguably the “Wonderwall” of the classical world), however that simply retains him from carrying out his welcome.
Within the context of Thursday evening, that mental pop sensibility paid off with a gap half that was a feast for the ears. The ASO was joined by three distinguished options: conductor Peter Oundjian (who helmed the rostrum all through the evening), pianist Inon Barnatan and the ASO’s personal Michael Tiscione on trumpet. The trio solidified the concerto with the type of deep cohesion that feels just like the work of celestial alignment.
Central to that interaction is a eager understanding of the character of the fabric, and that begins with Oundjian. He conducts with that lush, sculptural gravitas that one historically associates with classic radio and tv orchestras — precisely the type of ensemble that may have dealt with the form of music Shostakovich was channeling in his writing course of. Oundjian is well known for his conducting of Ralph Vaughan Williams, a up to date of Shostakovich. As such, there was a simple fusion of conductor with time interval and that consciousness cascaded throughout the ensemble.
Barnatan’s technical prowess is tempered by a delicate jazz contact that maintains aura and ambiance even throughout virtuosic runs, however it was within the softer, quieter statements that his delicate management actually shined. He and Tiscione have been the proper foils to one another and captured that majestic interweaving of the jazz age and its classical ancestry with all of the trans-dimensional respect it deserved.
With a lot promise constructed up within the first half, it was a disgrace that the second half ended up being lackadaisical. That’s not the ASO’s fault — they dealt with Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with all of the elegant savoir faire the event demanded. The issue is that Mahler wrote the work about 40 minutes longer than it wanted to be, and even probably the most adept orchestra can’t compensate for an absence of partaking materials.
That’s to not say that the work is a complete loss: It opens with the type of aggressively dense chordal harmonies that Mahler is thought for and showcases loads of oddly metered phrases that get tossed from one instrument to the subsequent at surprising intervals. These are the type of aggressive, disarming turns we anticipate from Mahler at his finest, however their affect is blunted by countless ostinatos that appear to do little greater than vamp for time. They’ve neither the hypnotic surrealism of Philip Glass nor the belligerent punkishness of John Cage — as a substitute, they simply type of float, aimless and (seemingly) countless.
“It’s simply so lengthy,” I heard somebody behind me moan after fairly just a few individuals had gotten up and walked out halfway by the piece. Typically I ponder if I’m the one one within the viewers that’s nonplussed by a piece just because listening critically is taking me out of the artistry of the piece. That positively wasn’t the case tonight.
A vital perception into the pairing of those two items may be present in this system notes, which declare that each composers are presenting parodies of earlier musical kinds. That doesn’t fairly really feel correct in both case. Shostakovich isn’t poking enjoyable on the template Gershwin established a decade prior — he’s making like to it. Mahler, however, is unquestionably having amusing, however somebody wanted to remind him that brevity is the soul of wit.
The ASO would in all probability have finished effectively to go forward and finish the season with Beethoven’s triumphant Ninth Symphony somewhat than holding it to kick off within the fall. Because it stands, the June 5 live performance raised questions on whether or not the proverbial glass was half full or half empty, however, both method, it wasn’t fairly as thirst-quenching because it may have been.