REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GEORGE HANSON

posted by James Reel

    Over the weekend, I learned that two married friends of mine, people who don’t often go to classical concerts, had attended the Tucson Symphony’s program on Friday night, the same night I went. “We looked at each other,” said the husband, “and said, ‘When did Tucson get such a good orchestra?’”
    Indeed, the TSO’s performance of Beethoven and Mahler under conductor George Hanson was quite strong and in many ways even impressive, although that would not surprise anybody who attends concerts more regularly. So many things about the performance were so right that I feel a little ungrateful wishing there’d been an additional dimension to the concert: a more surprising, more personal view of the music.
    Don’t get me wrong; there wasn’t anything dull or routine about the playing. In Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1, phrasing was nicely pointed, tempos seemed just, and the woodwinds had good presence, easily holding their own against the reduced string ensemble (8-8-6-4-2, which would be almost doubled for the Mahler to come). The drawback to using a modest, Beethoven-sized complement in the 2,200-seat TCC Music Hall is that the string sound becomes a bit diffused, as it did Friday.
    Furthermore, Hanson had significantly rearranged the orchestra, dividing the violins left and right, spreading the basses across the back just in front of the percussion on the top level of what look like new risers, and pulling everything to the lip of the stage. Moving the orchestra forward would help the TSO generate a hall-filling roar during the Mahler with improved clarity, and dividing the violins is almost always a good idea in anything. But there’s a problem specific to the TCC Music Hall: Anything downstage, stage left, must struggle to be heard. Usually it’s the cellos that saw away to little audible effect, but now it’s the second violins that suffer. Friday night they sounded fine when playing on their own, as at the beginning of the second movement in the Beethoven, but they completely disappeared into tutti passages. There’s not much Hanson and his players can do about this, short of hiring a wrecking ball, tearing down the hall and starting over.
    That balance issue aside, the performance was secure and efficient, but it didn’t display much character beyond what naturally springs from the page. That’s a good start, not to be discounted—too many dull or inattentive performers seem to do their best to stifle Beethoven’s natural character—but with Beethoven performances as plentiful as they are, it would be nice for Hanson to set his interpretation apart somehow.
    The Beethoven symphony was offered as a classical balance to Mahler’s hyper-romantic Symphony No. 5, but it was a missed programming opportunity. Mahler was a noted conductor as well as a composer, and he took it upon himself to “retouch” many scores by his forebears to make them more effective for his contemporary orchestra. I don’t think he messed with Beethoven’s First, but he did expand Beethoven’s Op. 95 string quartet and all of Schumann’s symphonies, the first or fourth of which would have fit comfortably onto this program in place of the Beethoven First. This would have given us a broader picture of Mahler’s artistry, while still providing the necessary stylistic contrast.
    The bulk of the concert shifted to the second part, devoted to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5; it’s almost three times as long as the Beethoven, though hardly a note is superfluous. Hanson is a very effective Mahler conductor, and this performance of the Fifth brought clarity to the music’s structure without downplaying its sonic and emotional effects. The first movement is very nearly a trumpet concerto, the solos played superbly by Ed Reid. Hanson and the orchestra brought a confident, almost imperceptible swagger to the funeral-march theme, and later played the famous Adagietto at a gently flowing tempo, not lugubriously as used to be common. In this movement Hanson made good use of modest rubato, usually drawing out ascending figures for extra expression.
    The entire performance was well balanced, from the loudest to the softest extremes, and took Mahler’s emotional outpourings seriously. Still, I kept wishing for just a little bit more—more indulgent portamento from the strings, a heightened sense of angst and neurosis. But there are more good ways than one to play Mahler, and it isn’t entirely fair of me to fault Hanson for not doing it my way when he and the orchestra put across his own slightly more reserved interpretation so effectively.