A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.
He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)
Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.
Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.
It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.
Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.
Take the Prokofiev concerto, in which Batiashvili’s tone was ample yet agile, as easily assertive as it was mysterious. Mäkelä’s conducting felt a shade too controlled. Nothing was wrong, exactly. The orchestra sounded terrific, the tempos reasonable.
But that same measure-by-measure management resulted in a certain dullness. This should be propulsive music, with vivid flavors, the first movement mournfully spectral, the second liltingly charming, the third zestily Spanish. Yet the performance on Friday tended bland: lovely and unexciting.
Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was even more glamorously played, but also felt like something of a warm bath. Bits were acute — the repeat of the first-movement exposition returned to the material with a ghostlier sheen — but full movements lacked through-lines of energy, focus and poignancy; the climaxes didn’t feel earned. The sweeping tune in the second movement is a test of a performance’s sincerity, and on Friday it felt gleamingly hopped-up and fake, with a cloying, manicured slide.
To be fair, the Rachmaninoff, an hourlong avalanche of lushness, is truly difficult to shape. Mahler’s First is the same length but more leanly structured, with a fractured, episodic score that is a better fit for Mäkelä.
Sure, the solemnity of the opening grew ever so slightly sluggish, and slow parts of the finale were drawn out past the point of creating useful contrast. But there was a hint of the maniacal as that finale began, as if the third movement’s eeriness had lingered. And the two inner movements were the most interesting things I’ve heard Mäkelä do.
The ländler dance in the second was robust and bumptious, with an undercurrent of darkness, and there was just the right amount of winking in the trio; the whole thing was a country fair picaresque. The third movement, played very straight and poised, was persuasively spooky, its ending a haunting braid of hymn, klezmerlike cafe music and funereal march.
Mäkelä, who in his young career has already shown a consistent commitment to contemporary music, deserves credit for bringing an American premiere to Carnegie, when it’s hardly the norm for the great European orchestras to tour with pieces by living composers.
Heard on Friday before the Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff, Ellen Reid’s “Body Cosmic” is a 15-minute tone poem about pregnancy (the first movement) and birth (the second). The work begins with soft, airy slipping, the sense of something quietly seething and forming. A simple lullaby-like melody, plucked out on the harp, is taken up by the flute and repeated again and again.
The sound grows in the second movement, with an insistent bell in the background and a mood of increasing emergency; yelps swell to roars. There’s a blast — then everything drops out except for a note from a solo violin.
Out of the vast ensemble, a single voice soars: the emergence of a precocious, untested young thing to match the one on the podium.
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