You have to jump to the last paragraph to see that he truly liked the performance. Stearns is writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Philadelphia Orchestra's performances of Mahler's Symphony No. 8, known as the "Symphony of a Thousand" and one of the greatest sonic feasts ever devised, require more than musical explanations - perhaps an environmental impact study.
The symphony's intermissionless 90 minutes of ecstatic exaltation over God, heaven, and other rarefied matters with four choruses, brass choirs in the balconies and lots of extra harps (the production cost was 10 times that of a typical concert) appears to leave audiences giddy, exiting hesitantly and not with the usual, "That was nice. Where do we eat?" Be forewarned, all Broad Street SEPTA drivers.
The restaurant situation near the Kimmel Center is so complicated by hundreds of choristers (350 are participating) needing pre-performance caffeine that the nearby Starbucks experienced The Invasion of the Tuxedo People around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Verizon Hall had the biggest nonamplified workout of its history: Its bricks and mortar rendered the gargantuan sound picture with grandeur and clarity, allowing the music's many fine details, from rumbling organ pedals to mandolin, to claim a precise place in the overall scheme of things. I heard more orchestration here than in my two Mahler 8th encounters in Carnegie Hall.
Performancewise, the concert was almost everything I want from the Mahler 8th. Almost? No single performance hits all bases equally well. Here, each chorus - the Philadelphia Singers Chorale, the Westminster Symphonic Choir, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and the American Boychoir - arrived with an institutional personality, so the unanimity once rendered by choral guru Robert Shaw can't be expected. Then again, Shaw lacked the depth of music director Christoph Eschenbach, now in the last weeks of his tenure, and, Mahler-wise, working along the excitable lines of the late Klaus Tennstedt.
The symphony begins with a Bach-on-acid treatment of the familiar "Veni, Creator Spiritus," then dramatizes the esoteric final scene of Goethe's Faust in Part Two. For Americans (and even devout Mahler fiends), Part Two is New Age bromides in arcane language, with music that's grand but somewhat impersonal, given the detached respect Mahler gives to the great Goethe.
To this, Eschenbach brings invaluable cultural understanding. Even when the otherwise excellent vocal soloists seemed not to be inside the text, the orchestral effects that accompanied them had great specificity of meaning. That barrier somewhat overcome, the performance revealed the music as the summation of all that Mahler was, reaching back 25 years to the choral writing of his first major work, Das Klagende Lied, and employing his great song "Im Mitternacht" as a basis for Part Two's dark-night-of-the-soul orchestral prelude - the highlight on Wednesday.
That's not to take away from the vocal soloists. With a possible recording in the offing, four international opera stars were on hand - Christine Brewer, Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Dean Griffey, and James Morris, and only the still-charismatic Morris was disappointing with questionable pitch. Blythe surpassed herself with clean lines and sensitive phrasing, prompting awestruck sidelong glances from her colleagues. The others - Franco Pomponi, Marisol Montalvo, Michaela Kaune and Charlotte Hellekant - were strong presences and not outclassed in the least. With community rush seats available 21/2 hours before tonight's and Saturday's sold-out performances, there's no excuse for missing this.
Topic: strange Eschenbach/Philly M8 review from David Patrick Stearns (Read 3481 times)