Sunday, which began with the new recording of Mahler's Second Symphony by
the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Frieburg (SWR), ended in Davies
Hall, and a concert by the touring North German Radio Orchestra of Hamburg
(NDR).  The common thread was not only the timing of the experience, the
nationality and the size of the orchestras, but also the strong impression
they made with first-rate performances.

I could see only the visiting Hamburg orchestra, so I have no idea about
the makeup of the SWR, but I hope they too have gotten away from the old,
stodgy, homogeneous European-orchestra look.  What we saw in Davies Hall
was a mostly young band of men and women, playing with "American
enthusiasm," not aged male music professors getting through yet another
evening of performance.  Even without seeing the Baden-Baden musicians,
however, I gather from the sound of the orchestra that a similar change
is taking place there as well.

So much about the similarities.  Now the big difference:  the SWR
performance is conducted by Michael Gielen, wonderfully well.  Hamburg
had its own chief conductor on the podium -Christoph Eschenbach, who is
simply not in the same category.  The orchestra is clearly better than
its conductor.  All sections, especially the woodwinds, have a steady,
consistent way of playing, which is not evident in the conductor's
interpretation.  Eschenbach doesn't let the music breathe, he is cutting
pauses short, rushing fast passages, and calls for vulgar, overdone
climaxes.  This was evident in both the "Euryanthe" Overture and the
Schoenberg orchestration of Brahms' Piano Quartet in G minor, but
especially in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (noisy first movement, sleepy
second, a Finale much too fast), although, ironically, the poor direction
was little noticed there because of the presence of Midori as the soloist.
The way she played tonight, nothing else mattered.

I gladly disregarded the yellow dress and silver shoes, forgot about
the waif-look (she is turning 30 soon, but looks smaller and thinner
than when she first burst on the scene at age 11), and just dissolved
into those opening notes - as singing, beautiful, trilling and thrilling
as I ever heard live.  From time to time, I noticed the strange,
mechanical, inappropriate things Eschenbach was doing with the orchestra
in the background, but attention immediately shifted back to a genius at
her very best (until, at the very end, even Midori fell victim to the
conductor's misdeeds, and ended the concerto with something that sounded
like a hiccup).

Gielen's "Resurrection" Symphony is fascinating.  It is a clear, perfectly
articulated, straightforward performance, flawlessly played by the Hamburg
orchestra (with a glorious brass section) through three movements.  and
then something unfortunate happens when "Urlicht" arrives.  Gielen's
precision and Cornelia Kallisch's strange parsing of the text (a German
alto who sounds as if German was not her language, so she has to be very
careful) combine to rob the work of the emotional high point it must reach
at this point.  Gielen and the orchestra excel again in the Finale, but
that movement (where volume is substituted for the - unrealized - intensity
of the previous movement) comes through only as a fireworks of sound.
Juliana Banse is the soprano, the EuropaChorAkademie (yes, written in a
computer-squashed string) handles the choral assignment in the Mahler,
yielding to the Berlin Rundfunk-Chor in the tacked-on Schoenberg "Kol
Nidre." (The double-CD is divided strangely between a 32-minute first
disc and a 75-minute second one.)

Over the weekend, I heard a strange resonance of the Gielen
cool-clear-straightforward sound when Mark Wigglesworth conducted the San
Francisco Symphony in Davies Hall.  The English conductor was fascinating
and most impressive with his intense, virtually Mahlerian Haydn (Symphony
No. 74), stark Britten ("Four Sea Interludes") - missing the lyricism
Donald Runnicles brought to the music night after night when he conducted
"Peter Grimes" across the street, in the War Memorial - and a "merciless"
reading of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 ("Ding Dong, Wicked Stalin
Is Dead"), with a performance towering over his previous appearance here,
playing the Shostakovich No. 7.

Of the three conductors I heard this weekend, given Wigglesworth's young
age, my money is on him for the future, hoping that he'll "warm up," and
catch fire the way Simon Rattle has.

Janos Gereben/SF, CA
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