REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA & CHORUS/GEORGE HANSON

posted by James Reel

    If a concert is a musical feast, then conductor George Hanson has fallen in with the slow food movement. Last night he served up a very well-prepared Tucson Symphony concert remarkable not only for its care of presentation but also for its preponderantly broad tempos.
    Slowness was not always a virtue last night. In Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture, its use seemed formulaic: quiet music = slow tempo. Even the loud, final peroration dragged a little; it could work at this tempo, but here it lacked grandeur because the orchestra just didn’t play full out. Hanson had reduced the string complement below what we usually expect for concert Wagner; the rest of the program—Mozart and Beethoven—needed chamber-scale forces, and there was no point in paying a lot of per-service string players for just 15 minutes of music. Despite the lack of forcefulness at the end, the orchestral balance actually sounded better than usual, with a good, solid bass (the cellos were fully audible for a change), and the strings holding their own against the woodwinds and brass (mainly because Hanson seemed to be holding the latter sections back a bit).
    Why, I wonder, did Hanson not also offer the “Venusberg Music,” which emerges straight from the overture in the Paris version of Tannhäuser? It would have added about 10 minutes to a very short first half, and given a little more work to the women of the TSO chorus, which was already positioned on stage for the rest of the concert: Beethoven’s little cantata Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and Mozart’s Requiem.
    Beethoven fared well last night; especially effective was the beautifully hushed choral/orchestral beginning. The TSO Chorus, prepared by Bruce Chamberlain, sang with admirable precision and flexibility, although the TCC Music Hall’s acoustics blurred the text at full volume, at least by the time the sound reached the balcony.
    The concert’s main matter was Mozart’s Requiem. I’ve heard so many variant editions of this work in the past few years that I’m more confused than enlightened when trying to figure out which one Hanson chose; I think it was a pretty straightforward version of the standard Süssmayr edition. This is not a matter of musicological arcana; Mozart famously died before completing this work, and his pupil Süssmayr finished it off, though not to the satisfaction of all critics, and several other editors have had a go at the work.
    Hanson and his forces took a fairly straightforward approach to the work. The large chorus, adept enough to finesse some tricky little dynamic swells, was solid and powerful, yet it didn’t overwhelm the small orchestra (reduced to two dozen strings plus woodwinds and brass). As in the Wagner, Hanson’s tempos tended to be on the slow side, except in the most dramatic sections. This worked well, without sapping the surprisingly abundant life from this death-soaked music; the Kyrie, for example, was nicely crip and clipped. The soloists—soprano Linda Mabbs, mezzo Malin Fritz, tenor Carl Halvorson and bass Gustav Andreassen—did well, although the two women were not to my taste, applying a wide, nonstop, unvaried vibrato more appropriate to Wagner and Verdi than to Mozart. No complaints about Michael Becker’s suave trombone solo in the Tuba mirum. Now let’s see if the critic in the morning daily characteristically credits that solo to the tuba.