No orchestra should play Mahler's Third Symphony on four consecutive
nights.  (Few should play it even once.)

The San Francisco Symphony tonight performed that feat and there were
consequences of the impossible marathon, but also some great, admirable
accomplishments.

While their colleagues across Grove Street tackled the five-hour
Messiaen opera, "Saint Francois d'Assise" twice, Michael Tilson Thomas'
band played eight hours of Mahler between Wednesday and Saturday.  Perhaps
all this is part of the city's bid for the 2012 Olympics - yes, we can
handle marathons.

Curiously, the best came at the end of this great effort, from the
combined string sections, led by the cellos (brilliant all evening long)
and concertmaster Alexander Barantschik.  The lengthy, meditative Adagio
("what love tells me") before the blazing finale should go right into
the CD the Symphony is preparing, untouched.

It was all of one piece, a steady, smoothly flowing, timeless,
right-breathing, deeply-felt, brilliant instance of ensemble playing at
its possible best, MTT pacing the performance flawlessly and yet with a
sense of improvisation, of inventing the music.

The gigantic first movement did not have the same level of near-perfection.
The brass was outstanding, the notes were all there, but - especially
in the beginning - the music was loud, rather than powerful.  It was an
adequate performance (truly a big deal in case of the Third), but lacking
in sustained intensity.  Those huge statements were coming out of the
orchestra rather neatly and somewhat blandly, instead of gushing, bursting
in a stammering, volcanic flow in which even the pauses, the spaces
between notes crackle with tension.

Still, near the end of the first movement, Mahler at his most Ivesian,
MTT's mastery of that kind of material helped to meet the challenge, and
he held the orchestra together the best exactly in the passages that
usually fly apart.

The Menuetto, which opens Part II, was full of sweetness, of the
Viennese Sachertorte variety, charming, not too rich.  The Scherzo
had Glenn Fischthal's wonderfully singing offstage posthorn solo, in
combination with something you never hear from this great trumpeter:
several breaks on high notes.  This is where that run of four nights
show up, perhaps inevitably.

Michelle DeYoung's solo ("O Mensch!  Gib Acht!") was on par with her
best.  The women of Vance George's Symphony Chorus, members of Kevin
Fox's Pacific Boychoir McMane's San Francisco Girls Chorus performed
with great elan, understandably eager to have their five minutes' worth
of prominence after sitting in the background for seemingly forever.
(I always wonder what Mahler was thinking of, employing 140 singers in
such a neglectful fashion.  But then, this is a man who never used 100
musicians if he could get 200.)

All extraneous matters (of resource management, logistics, audio tracks,
the musicians' fatigue) disappeared during that heavenly Adagio, as we
basked in the light and warmth of that great musical meditation, reluctant
to see it disappear in the forte of the finale.  If we could, we would
have held onto it, "ewig, einig, ohne Ende."

Janos Gereben/SF
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