TITANIC OPENING NIGHT: 2017-18 Tucson Symphony Orchestra

"I played 'Margariteña' with the Youth Orchestra at least 100 times, including once in Panama when we performed it with Mahler’s first symphony. This performance of Margariteña will celebrate the life and work of Inocente Carreño, who died in May 2016.”  ~ José Luis Gomez

TSO 2017-2018 Opening Night

The first concert of Jose Luis Gomez's so-called “Inaugural Season” - his second season conducting, but his first to design and control all the programs himself – was a resounding success. Opening with the TSO premier of a South American composer, followed by works from the two most popularly performed composers by U.S. orchestras, the stage was set for a detailed and exuberant statement to be made. Both Conductor and Orchestra were up for the task at hand, providing a worthy array and mastery of expression. Maestro Gomez's conducting is energetic and physically demonstrative. Tension is held and released with dance-like motions and control. Arms, wrists, and hands smoothly embrace and articulate the flow of musical lines. The shading, timing, and architecture of each phrase is communicated very clearly and easily to the players, resulting in an impressive 'ensemble', simple and fresh, while Dante's fires lie smoldering and ready...

The evening began with Maestro Gomez honoring his own roots as a child growing up in 'El Systema' – Venezuela's educational program for young musicians – by giving tribute to revered Venezuelan composer Inocente Carreño, in the TSO premier of his 'Margariteña', a mid-20th Century 'tour de force' of orchestral color and intensity, based on popular Venezuelan melodies. Each of the half dozen musical sections became strong individual statements, highly contrasting in style from each other, and held together by the recurring rhythms and melodic fragments of the song medley within. And while I am sure the full evocation from the setting of familiar Venezuelan songs would be mostly lost on a Tucson classical audience, this was a great introduction to some delicious music, rendered in a robustly dramatic style – very successful.

The feature of the program's first half was Beethoven's 2nd Piano Concerto, with acclaimed, Western trained, Chinese pianist Zhang Zuo. This very early effort by Beethoven – he was 25 – shown well on both orchestra and soloist. The structure of each movement here is classically balanced. The orchestra's role is a fully integrated dialogue with the soloist, compared with later 19th Century soloist-dominated piano concerti. This collaboration with the soloist was crisply aware, precise, and seamless. The piano part does show certain characteristics of later romanticism, rising beyond Mozartian parameters, by infusing rapid, florid passage work from the outset – sculpted here with beautiful tone and effortless speed by Zhang, "ZZ", Zuo – while repeatedly being brought down to earth with short bursts of dramatic intensity – a characteristic highly developed in Beethoven's succeeding piano works. The second movement 'Adagio' provided a most delicate interplay between orchestra and soloist; strikingly original, and performed here as a tender love duet – a very compelling drama indeed. The delicacy ends abruptly with the piano attacking the rondo 'Allegro'; a crisp. almost breathless romp to the finish line. As the intensity of the drama peaked, Zuo would suddenly summon full force to the piano, dispelling any possible doubts as to the range of expression she could draw from the instrument. This is not a strident emotional or revolutionary statement by Beethoven. Yet within its relatively contained parameters, this was an excellent performance. Ms. Zuo appeared humbled and flattered by the well-deserved applause, yet excited to show another side of her artistry as, after a couple of curtain calls, she sat at the piano and coyly teased out the opening motif of Liszt's 'La Campanella'. The audience's piqued attention was soon richly rewarded as Zuo poured out the ever-shifting, always rich layers of this highly embellished Liszt showpiece. Zuo's super clear articulation and bright, easy-flowing virtuosity were quite impressive in both the Beethoven and Liszt, echoing, to large degree, the style of her more famous compatriot Yuja Wang. I left for Intermission with the beautiful ringing tones of Zhang Zuo's piano-playing dancing happily in my head.

The program's second half was a rousing, dramatic “heavy metal” finale: Mahler's First Symphony. It struck me that this most well known and popular of Mahler's works must have seemed quite bewildering to it's first audiences in the late 1880's. The serene beauty of its opening is quickly interrupted by rolling horn calls, seemingly out of nowhere – and played offstage, no less. A myriad of simplistic themes, interspersed with lilting bird-like sounds and low, portentous bass lines, are flashed, in and out, by a bright, optimistic, frenetically rhythmic main theme. Modern listeners generally soak all of this in, yet heard with fresh ears, it is a revolution very much at odds with the centuries of Germanic music which precede it – and that is just the first movement! On this night the orchestra players earned excellent credit in their delivery of the highly disparate elements which Mahler taps in creating this drama. Maestro Gomez's vision does not wallow in Mahler's darker atmospheres, and was piercingly precise and rapid-fire through the demands of the first movement and the thrilling finale, without the slightest smearing the wild combinations of instrumental lines. That is some tough duty, which this ensemble seemed truly to relish the opportunity, and came through with flying colors. The traditionally somewhat sleepy classical Tucson audience started to break out into a spontaneous and well-deserved ovation at the first movement's end. Then they realized, “Oh, we're not supposed to do that...” and settled back down. But the musical/emotional drama did not.

Though now seemingly routine, the second movement is a brash statement. And the infamous third movement's "Frère Jacques in a minor key" -- offset with a Klezmer-like middle section, then later a dilliance into an un-thematically-related Mahler song -- comprises an earthy, anti-stuffy revelation of Classical and Romantic symphonic expectations. The finale is a dizzyingly dive into contrasts of brass/percussion explosions, extremely tender melancholy, reprises of first movement themes, and the overpoweringly exuberant conclusion. On this night, all were navigated on a tight, straightforward line. As per this conductor's pathway to this drama, the outsized, heavyweight culmination of forces never became cumbersome. This was as stridently pure and powerful of a reading of this miniature epic as I have ever heard. And it demonstrated the kind of incisive interpretive depth and instrumental virtuosity that holds the promise of new heights of artistic achievement for this orchestra. Bravissimo to José Luis Gomez and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra players!

~ Steven Gendel


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