Back in 1996, when he was just beginning his landmark tenure on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Fifth. In the mold of his mentor, Leonard Bernstein, he was already renowned as a specialist in that composer.
“Some people can conduct Mahler and some cannot,” Alex Ross wrote of the performance in The New York Times. “Mr. Thomas certainly can.”
As he proved again on Thursday, when he led the Philharmonic in the same symphony at David Geffen Hall. Thomas, at 79, still has both the patience and the passion to take us through Mahler’s sprawling, sometimes shaggy structures.
That is even more impressive now. It has been more than three years since Thomas was first treated for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and he is still relishing his work. In April, he even took on a new teaching role at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Concerned eyes are always on him, of course, especially after reports in May that he appeared confused during a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony in London. But on Thursday, other than some slow paging through his score between the second and third movements, and some stiffness getting on and off the podium, Thomas seemed alert and ardent, even hopping a few inches into the air at one full-hearted moment.
It was an inspiring opening night for a Philharmonic season that is starting off with some of the unsettled quality of a Mahler symphony.
Before the concert, musicians stood outside Geffen Hall and gave out fliers reminding the audience that contract negotiations are continuing. Also unresolved is the status of two players accused of sexual misconduct and currently suspended. The orchestra’s president and chief executive, Gary Ginstling, abruptly stepped down in July, after just a year on the job. And the ensemble will now be without a music director for two years, until Gustavo Dudamel’s contract finally begins in full.
Those troubles seemed to fade into the background in the serenity of the opener on Thursday, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14. This is elegantly even-keeled music, not raucous or even particularly playful, and it had a well chosen soloist in Emanuel Ax, one of the field’s most understated (and therefore most taken-for-granted) stars.
Other than the slightest bit of beefy burr in a few notes in the first movement, Ax’s touch was gentle and unruffled; his interplay with Thomas and the orchestra, friendly and unpressured. The audience seemed eager for an encore, but Ax demurred, perhaps recognizing that, with a symphony of more than an hour coming after intermission, it was a long evening.
The concert’s halves could hardly have been more different: No one would call Mahler’s Fifth even-keeled. This wasn’t the tidiest performance, or a squeak-free one. Under Thomas’s baton, you felt the wandering length of the Scherzo at the symphony’s center and of the unendingly cheerful Finale, and you didn’t always feel sufficiently vivid contrasts, in pulse or mood, among the piece’s many varied episodes.
But he and the orchestra seemed palpably to savor the expansive journey of this restless work, rather than just keeping time between grand climaxes. This led to some pungent details — a curdled viola pluck, a bassoon line sounding like damp earth — and evocative colors, like the mysterious softness of the strings after the granitic force of the symphony’s opening bars.
The cellos played their aching outpouring in the second movement with focus and restraint, and, from an orchestra that is not the most idiomatic in Central European dances, there was an unusually sweet delicacy to the lilting ländler rhythms. Thomas didn’t milk the sentimentality of the famous Adagietto, letting it flow, and started the Finale with a deliberate pace that rendered it a gradual emergence from a dream instead of a sudden awakening.
There have been more taut and blazing Fifths, but this one had searching, saturnine weight; it left an appropriately disorienting impact. Some conductors can convey Mahler’s intensity without overkill, and some cannot. Mr. Thomas certainly can.
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