FORT WORTH--If you’re a lover of Mahler symphonies -- heck, if you just love big orchestral extravaganzas -- get yourself to Bass Performance Hall. The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s Friday night performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the first of three over the weekend, was genuinely exciting -- and very good.
The 95-minute symphony calls for a huge orchestra -- extra winds, eight horns, an offstage posthorn and considerable percussive boom and clatter -- plus an alto soloist, boys’ and womens’ choirs. The extended Bass Hall stage was indeed well stuffed with musicians Friday night, with the women of the Fort Worth Kantorei crowded onto risers on the left of the stage. The Texas Boys Choir sang from two levels of boxes just outside the proscenium.
Right from the start, with horns raising a thrilling summons -- Mahler imagined it as the god Pan awakening -- music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya maintained flawless timing and momentum. Great musical performances are aural equivalents of physical feng shui -- the fastidious management of energy through time. Harth-Bedoya got it consistently right.
He even got a just-right pace in the second-movement minuet, which too many conductors take too slowly. He gave it just enough spring in its step and managed its tricky tempo shifts with assurance.
When rhythms wanted real snap, as in the first-movement march, they snapped quite crisply indeed. But out-of-body slow music in the fourth movement and finale was exquisitely extruded and sustained.
And how gloriously the orchestra played, an accomplishment all the more impressive given the challenge of blending in so many extra players. The brasses were particularly superb. Horns were polished and fearless (although a few smudged attacks betrayed understandably tiring lips), trumpets as capable of muted comments as of brazen blasts, trombones rising to every demand.
Just occasionally, you could tell that these weren’t, say, Philadelphia Orchestra violins, but strings overall played with focus and finesse, cellos especially so. For Mahler, who of all composers writes the most independent second-violin parts, it was good to have seconds lending stereophonic effects from the right of the stage, opposite the firsts.
Adding extra winds always adds tuning challenges, and these weren’t completely solved, but the playing was characterful and colorful.
There were lots of excellent solo contributions, too many to cite. But special praise goes to suave cameos from trombonist Joseph Dubas (in one of the most demanding trombone solos anywhere), trumpeter Kyle Sherman (playing the offstage posthorn solos on a cornet, a sensible substitution) and Nikolette LaBonte, subbing this season as principal horn.
If there was a repeated complaint, it was that Harth-Bedoya whipped up maximum decibels too early and too often, so there was nowhere to go for each movement’s ultimate climax. And those multiple climaxes, one after another, were really loud, even toward the back of the main floor. (I pitied people sitting closer to the stage.)
I hear the alto solos in the fourth and fifth movements delivered with more of an Earth Mother tone than Kelley O’Connor’s firmly focused mezzo, but she sang boldly and well. The women’s chorus, prepared by Maritza Cáceres, sounded aptly fresh; the boys, prepared by Kerra Simmons, were too timid.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 12 and 2 p.m. Oct. 13 at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $22 to $97. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.
Formerly staff classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell continues covering the beat as a freelance writer. Classical music coverage at The News is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The News makes all editorial decisions.
