Symphony/Chorale Concert: A review

Very positive review of Thursday's performance, I'm proud to report. It's not too late to get tickets online for tonight's or tomorrow afternoon's concerts. 

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Music alert: Beethoven's Ninth at Benaroya Hall

Seattle's Benaroya Hall is one of the great concert venues in the nation. Every year the Seattle Symphony and Chorale perform Beethoven's great Ninth ("Choral") Symphony to a full house. This year's performances are New Year's Eve and January 2, 3, and 4th.

The first person to email me gets the key to order two Chorale member-discount tickets ($20 instead of $80) to the New Year's Eve 9:00 p.m. performance.

It's a great way to start the New Year.

Seattle Times reviews opening performance

The sounds that filled the ear on Thursday showcased superb orchestral work, a wealth of choral power and delicacy from the Seattle Symphony Chorale, the Seattle Pro Musica and the Northwest Boychoir, finely integrated solos from sopranos Lauren Flanigan, Jane Eaglen and Jane Giering-De Haan, altos Nancy Maultsby and Jane Gilbert, tenor Vinson Cole, bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd and bass Harold Wilson, all underpinned by Joseph Adam's strong yet never obtrusive contribution at the organ. Schwarz kept everything under seemingly effortless control. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to bring the usually overwhelming first movement and the intermittently tedious second into an unusually effective, and often magically atmospheric, balance.


Seattle Symphony triumphs in Mahler's big Eighth

Seattle Symphony's Gerard Schwarz brings magical balance to Mahler's grand, unwieldy "Symphony of a Thousand."

By Bernard Jacobson

Special to The Seattle Times

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"Symphony of a Thousand"

By Gustav Mahler, Seattle Symphony Orchestra with Gerard Schwarz conducting. 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle; $17- $102 (206-215-4747 or www.seattlesymphony.org). Concert review

This week's performances of the biggest symphony Mahler ever wrote are being "dedicated to the many thousands of people who contributed to both the creation of Benaroya Hall and its monumental impact on our great city," according to the program. Thursday's subscription season opener was, in those terms, a triumph.

Never, in my few live experiences of this gigantic work, have all its multifarious textural strands emerged with such clarity and impact. It was hard to know which to admire more: Mahler's skill in creating an edifice of sound at once massive and lucid, or music director Gerard Schwarz's in realizing both the massiveness and the lucidity. But either way, the result was a ringing endorsement of the hall's acoustic excellence.

Schwarz has recently been bringing Mahler's bigger symphonies before the public at the rate of one a season — since 2006, the Third, the Seventh and the Sixth. The vividness of the composer's inspiration has benefitted, on each occasion, from the conductor's equally vivid sympathy for the expressive fervor of the music and his ability to shape its often wildly varied elements into a coherent whole.

The Eighth — known as the "Symphony of a Thousand" — poses a different structural problem. Its two movements are settings respectively of the ninth-century Latin hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus" and the final scene of Goethe's "Faust." Mahler succeeded brilliantly in unifying his treatment of these two vastly different texts, but at the cost of variety. The seven-note figure that dominates the hourlong second movement is exploited far more repetitively than its potential justifies. And the method by which Mahler stretches relatively few motifs over his vast canvas is not development so much as permutation: the first movement's obsessive juggling with a handful of melodic ideas, in particular, reveals where Schoenberg's ultimately mechanistic 12-tone serial technique had its origins.

The sounds that filled the ear on Thursday showcased superb orchestral work, a wealth of choral power and delicacy from the Seattle Symphony Chorale, the Seattle Pro Musica and the Northwest Boychoir, finely integrated solos from sopranos Lauren Flanigan, Jane Eaglen and Jane Giering-De Haan, altos Nancy Maultsby and Jane Gilbert, tenor Vinson Cole, bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd and bass Harold Wilson, all underpinned by Joseph Adam's strong yet never obtrusive contribution at the organ. Schwarz kept everything under seemingly effortless control. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to bring the usually overwhelming first movement and the intermittently tedious second into an unusually effective, and often magically atmospheric, balance.

Bernard Jacobson: bernardijacobson@comcast.net

Music: Bach B-Minor Mass at Benaroya

If you love the classics, do not miss the Seattle Symphony/Chorale performance of one of Bach's greatest works. Because it demands so much, it's not performed every year. Performances are March 20-22. What follows is a trailer from a German performance. I can promise you SSO/C will surpass this one.

If you plan to attend, let me know--maybe we can meet after the show.

Holiday Music: Messiah at Benaroya Hall

Seattle Symphony and Seattle Symphony Chorale with Christian Knapp, Conductor, and soloists perform Handel's Messiah next week. I'll be in the front row looking for you. Don't miss--it's packed every year!

Many in the audience will have traveled some distance--from as far as San Francisco and Seattle. We're lucky--just a ferry ride and a short walk.