SA Symphony: Rachleff bids adieu with all cylinders firing in Mahler, Bartok
May 31, 2008In his valedictory as music director of the San Antonio Symphony on May 30, Larry Rachleff put his 4H virtues -- head, heart, hand, hedonics -- on full display and reminded us why his too-brief tenure was so treasurable.
He and the orchestra were in top form in two early-20th-century works of contrasting character. They opened with Bela Bartok's lurid, violent suite from "The Miraculous Mandarin" and closed with Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4, which rises gently from Earth to Heaven.
Bartok composed "The Miraculous Mandarin" for a ballet-pantomime in which a young woman is forced by three "tramps" to lure men up to her room to be robbed. The first two have no money and are sent away. The third, the mysterious Mandarin, frightens the woman, who tries to run from him -- the scene with which the suite ends. The full-length score adds about 10 minutes of music tracing the tramps' attempts to kill the Mandarin by, in turn, suffocating, stabbing and hanging him, and his refusal to die until he's satisfied his lust. This music, excluded from the suite, tends to be exceedingly weird, more sick and hallucinatory than violent, and it ends with a whimper. Although the piece was played almost exclusively in its shorter form for many years, the full score has gained a footing in recent times.
Even without the excised music, the suite stands as one of the most viscerally exciting and brilliantly colored works in the symphonic repertoire. It makes virtuosic demands of several principals, of the orchestra as a whole and of the conductor. More than 80 years after its first performance, its complex textures and harsh colors can still disturb audiences. Rachleff helped by introducing the piece with a summary of the action, illustrated with orchestral excerpts.
As we've come to expect from Rachleff, the performance was vividly rendered, fully attentive to the theatrical moment and superbly put together. Ensemble was precise but not so tightly controlled as to tame the wildness and eroticism of this music -- a difficult balance to pull off. Principal clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg delivered his seduction-scene solos with a serpentine sultriness worthy of Marlene Dietrich.
Mahler's Fourth is his most intimate symphony in both scale and demeanor. Though the emotional range is wide, it is subtly shaded, avoiding the extremes. Notwithstanding the scherzo's sinister episodes for solo violin, played with astonishing élan by concertmaster Ertan Torgul, the work as a whole can be described as affectionate.
So, too, the performance. It was beautifully detailed, the balances ideally gauged, the tempo relations conceived to pull the listener along. Splendid instrumental solos abounded: Principal horn Jeff Garza joins Torgul atop the honor roll. The soprano solo in the final movement seems to call for a narrower, brighter and more childlike voice than Susan Lorette Dunn's, with its prominent vibrato and richness, but that may be a matter of personal taste. Anyway, one shouldn't begrudge Rachleff the privilege of sharing his farewell appeareance with his wife
