Mahler, Symphony No. 7: San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 8.6.2007 (HS)

 

When the Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas played this symphony in 2005, their work produced a compact disc that earned two classical Grammy awards earlier this year. In reviewing that live performance on this site, I concluded: "Tilson Thomas approached the rangy, messy score with no apologies, no attempt to pretty up Mahler's inconsistencies and abrupt transitions, no overlay of interpretive gloss. He just plowed through the music as Mahler wrote it, warts and all, and damned if it wasn't absolutely thrilling stuff."

On their final subscription concerts of the season Tilson Thomas and the orchestra took the Mahler Seventh for a victory lap, and if anything the performance I heard Friday was even more assured, more complete, more compelling than what they put on CD two years ago. This conductor approaches Mahler with a modernist's eye for the clashing dissonance and the unusual sonority, but he lavishes the Viennese schmaltz underlying it all with tremendous feeling. That wellspring of German Romantic music bubbles underneath all the goings-on in this symphony. This performance tapped into it, and that's what glued it all together even better than the stunning performances of 2005.

Although the music lost nothing of its energy, rubbing off some of the rough edges framed the solo work congenially. Among the more ear-catching solo turns, count the tenor horn solos in the first movement, enunciated soulfully by principal trombonist Mark Lawrence (and mirrored uncannily by principal trumpet William M. Williams Jr. in perfect echo). This is the big tune that returns in full force from the entire brass section at the end of the finale. Other soloists take a run at it as well, most notably acting principal horn Robert Ward, who except for one exposed bobble acquitted himself admirably throughout the proceedings. In his case, the muted horn echoes from Kimberly Wright added the perfect shadow.

Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik imbued the sweet melody of the fourth-movement serenade with an innocence that made a marked contrast with all that surrounded it. And timpanist David Herbert's interjections at the start of the finale kicked that movement into high gear. For all this fine solo work, the unanimity of the individual sections gave this performance a special gleam: yelps from the clarinets, glassy undercurrents of the flutes and, most of all, all manner of fanfares from the brass.

This time around, the suite of three middle movements in Mahler's outsized score went for more overt expressiveness than the 2005 performances. The marches in the second movement mocked those of the first, rather than turning the music in a whole new direction. The spooky death rattles in the third movement seemed more overt and the fourth movement went for a more heart-on-sleeve sentimentality than what had been a knowing wink before. The finale made more of Mahler's parody of Wagner's Die Meistersinger music. Although it lurched just as unexpectedly as ever from one style to another, that undercurrent of German Romantic feeling made it practically dance through the big finish.

Originally, the curtain-raiser was to have been the final scene of Salome, the Strauss opera that, like the Mahler Seventh, premiered in 1905, but soprano Lisa Gasteen cancelled too late to locate a suitable replacement. Before intermission, Barantschik, with Tilson Thomas on piano, ambled gracefully through Mozart's minor-hued Sonata No. 7 in E minor. The parallels with Mahler's fourth-movement Serenade were unmistakable.

 

Harvey Steiman