REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GEORGE HANSON, CONDUCTOR

posted by James Reel

    If the Tucson Symphony’s current cycle is distressingly cautious—three shameless crowd-pleasers from an orchestra and music director formerly willing to take a chance with such substantial new works as John Corigliano’s First Symphony—at least the performances are vibrant, secure, and get right to the heart of each score.
    Consider the opening section of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, played last night with full awareness of the music’s origin in the opera house; the cello work began as a recitative, then smoothed out into an aria. (Was Mary Beth Tyndall substituting for Nelzimar Neves in the principal spot? From my distance and angle I couldn’t tell, but the principal’s sound was a bit sweeter and less robust than the Neves norm—not inferior, just different.) Similarly, the phrasing was nice and loose in the flute-oboe conversation in the pastoral third episode, even though conductor George Hanson kept things moving at a fairly brisk clip. Because of Hanson’s refusal to linger in the first and third sections, the storm and the galloping finale sounded a bit slower than they really were, yet the performance was suitably rousing.
    Hanson also cheated the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony of some essential tempo contrast; the introduction didn’t seem much slower than the main matter, so we lost the sequence of anticipation and release that Beethoven built into the score. There’s little else to complain about (aside from a few stray instrumental bobbles), and much to admire, even if one could quibble with some of Hanson’s decisions. His tempos tended to be brisk, taking the composer’s disputed metronome markings fairly seriously though perhaps not going all the way, yet Hanson held back the Scherzo’s central trio in the old-fashioned manner, not quite conveying a sense of either song or dance. The Allegretto was no-nonsense, and the final movement was mostly well-handled, after the violins’ dismal first two utterances—it was as if half of them had forgotten they’d have to start the movement attaca and barely scraped out a whimper where their notes should have been shouts. Things proceeded splendidly after that. Hanson maintained careful balance across the orchestra, not letting subsidiary lines (the horns’, for instance) come so far forward that the music succumbed to its own banality. Melodically, this movement is frankly dreadful, but it can pack a wallop through sheer momentum, which Hanson and the TSO provided without becoming pointlessly frantic (the main fault of Gustavo Dudamel’s recent, heavily hyped recording).
    Beethoven and Manuel de Falla had fundamentally different concepts of orchestral weight and color, but some of their music has more in common than you might think. The centerpiece of last night’s concert was music from Falla’s ultra-Spanish ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (the two suites, about two-thirds of the full score). Both Beethoven’s Seventh and Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat require rhythmic spring and unashamed exuberance, and the Falla certainly got that and more out of Hanson and the TSO.
    OK, the horns were consistently too loud, but otherwise the performance was remarkable for the clarity of the many layers of line and color, the rhapsodic sweep of the strings, the always firm bass, and above all the clean articulation and sharp rhythm that make this music sound truly Spanish.