SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Debussy, Schoenberg, and Brahms: Ingo Metzmacher, cond., Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 31.1.2008 (BJ)


Getting Brahms’s First Symphony right presents a conductor with a number of small challenges and at least one big crux. The latter concerns the integration of the brief but grand reprise near the end of the chorale-like theme first heard in the Più Andante section of the introduction to the finale. The question–rather like the one at the end of the first movement in Schubert’s “Great C-major” Symphony–is whether to keep going at the fast tempo that has been established by this juncture, or to slow down to accommodate the majesty of the moment. Not only, I might add, to accommodate that majesty, but also to bring home the fact that this is indeed the return of material heard quietly much earlier, and not just a new theme arriving out of the blue.

At this performance, even if I was not totally in agreement with the way every one of the smaller decisions was made – the conductor clearly understood the largamente marking at the recapitulation of the finale’s main theme to imply merely “slower than the music immediately before it,” whereas I take it to mean “slower than in the exposition,” to give the soft trumpets added here more time to “speak”– nevertheless I found the pacing of the work as a whole highly effective, and at the crucial moment described above, Ingo Metzmacher demonstrated a most impressive mastery of the subtle art of transition. The chorale theme emerged in all its grandeur, and led to a conclusion that was truly and electrifyingly majestic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should report that I have myself had the pleasure of collaborating with this immensely talented 50-year-old German conductor: back in 1994, in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, I narrated a performance he led – and led brilliantly – of Virgil Thomson’s The Plow that Broke the Plains. So I suppose I might be said to be predisposed in his favor. But no special considerations were needed in order to admire the lively, polished, and stylistically apt playing he drew from the Seattle Symphony throughout this program, whose first half began with the symphonic fragments from Debussy’s Martyre de Saint Sébastien and continued with the 1943 revision of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.

Neither of those is a work I particularly like, but Metzmacher made as strong a case for both of them as could have been wished. The cool woodwind and brass sonorities in the Debussy were matched by some remarkably cultivated string tone, and the very far from cool textures of Schoenberg’s indeed rather overheated piece were realized with gorgeous opulence of sound, enhanced by fine solos from principal violist Susan Gulkis Assadi.

Frank Almond too (one of the team of four concertmasters recently appointed by music director Gerard Schwarz), had his work cut out with Schoenberg’s frequent solos, and did it with consummate taste and technical aplomb. But it was in the Brahms symphony that he (with the only violin solo in all of the composer’s orchestral music) and his colleagues were most impressive, if only for the simple reason that – in my judgement at least – the work itself offers a far more complex and rewarding experience than its program companions on the night. And what Metzmacher gave us was a vibrant, beautifully proportioned, propulsive, yet sufficiently serene and contemplative realization of what is surely the greatest first symphony ever written. I hope to see him back on the Benaroya podium before long.

Bernard Jacobson


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