Since the Florida Philharmonic’s disappearance eight years ago, the local listener’s need for big orchestral ensembles has been filled by guest orchestras from outside Florida or overseas, the New World Symphony orchestral academy in Miami Beach, and the larger college groups such as the Frost Symphony at the University of Miami.
Although Palm Beach County has several fine smaller orchestras, its only full-size symphonic group is the student orchestra at Lynn University in Boca Raton, a group of some 75 or so players that in recent years has tackled such thorny challenges as the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses, Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces and last season, the Mahler Fifth Symphony.
The Lynn Philharmonia’s concerts have been well-attended for years by audiences who enjoy regular outings with large orchestras, but the quality has been variable, as one might expect from a conservatory with a lower profile than the biggest names in the business, such as the Curtis Institute. Yet the growth in this orchestra’s skill has been noticeable, and this year, it seems to have a higher level still.
The string section has expanded considerably over the past two seasons, and the Philharmonia now has a sizable complement of violins, violas, cellos and basses, enough to have real character, warm and rich one moment, sharp and aggressive the next. The weakness has been chiefly in the brass section, and Saturday night’s concert of music by Mozart (the Jupiter Symphony, No. 41 in C, K. 551) and Mahler (the Symphony No. 1) still showed there’s plenty of room for improvement in the trumpets, horns and trombones. But there’s no doubt that this particular assemblage of student brass players is better than the one last season: more accurate, more reliable, and more durable.
There were other things that kept the performance of these two masterworks somewhat shy of total excellence, but it seems to fair to say that a concertgoer who wants to hear a good, large symphony orchestra in Palm Beach County, and who doesn’t want to wait for the major visitors, can find much to admire and appreciate at a Lynn Philharmonia concert.
Conductor Albert-George Schram led a persuasive, muscular version of Mozart’s last symphony to open the concert at the Wold Performing Arts Center, which was well-attended and enthusiastically received. Gratifyingly enough, there was no dispute in the introduction about when everyone was supposed to start (a stumbling block for many orchestras in music from this period), and throughout the evening cues were solid and crisply executed.
Schram’s tempos were brisk and unfussy, and dynamics were carefully attended to, with clear contrasts between louds and softs. The string section was uniformly fine, at home with the secondary whistle-ready tunes so prevalent in Mozart as much as they were with the fiddle fire that is such a key component of the finale. In the first movement, winds, brass and strings were balanced just as they should be to bring out the drama of the music, and it made a promising beginning (though I think the repeat, which Schram cut, should have stayed).
The strings carry the major weight of the slow movement, and they did so admirably. There also were some lovely touches: the second half of the opening motif had a tasteful decrescendo down to the tonic note, which is the kind of detail possible only when you have enough good players that can pull that off in unison. In the minuet, dynamics again were to the fore, and well-followed, and the music had a strong sense of the dance. The opening could have used some more shape – those first two bars work best when the music falls into the third bar – and the trio would have benefited from a bit more contrast.
The finale was mostly excellent, full of life and vigor, with impressive playing from strings and winds. Things were a shade too headlong, though; Schram, as he showed during the Verdi Requiem last year, tends to power through things, beating steadily, when only the slightest bit of rubato would make all the difference in the world. Here, for example, the setup for the final fugue was too metronomic, which made the preparation sound rushed, and the fugue was off and running before the ear was ready.
Gustav Mahler made his professional name as an opera conductor in the works of Mozart, and his very last conscious act on his deathbed in May 1911 was to whisper Mozart’s name as he moved his fingers, conducting a ghostly orchestra only he could hear. A careful examination of Mahler’s music shows that for all its excess and bombast, the composer judged his effects precisely, and much of the writing is indebted to Mozart for the elder composer’s example of harmonic surprise and attention to textural clarity.
And this Mahler performance, which had numerous cracked wind and brass notes at important points, was nevertheless a truly fine reading of this great, wholly original work. In its playing of the piece, the Lynn Philharmonia gave it the right feeling of nervy weirdness and dramatic shock that makes Mahler sing. The klezmer band that rises up from Frère Jacques in the third movement sounded as though it had wandered in from a wedding down the street, where perhaps they were dancing as rustically as the orchestra suggested in its playing of the second movement, where it had an earthy sense of titanic beat.
The trickiest parts of this symphony were the trickiest for the Lynn players, such as the opening tableau, with its unison A sounding in multiple registers. One of the lower voices was not quite in tune with the rest at first, though that slid into place later on, and the horns and trumpets were not sufficiently warmed up to make their entrances. In short, it was hang-your-head messy.
But that all changed when the cellos and basses entered with the Ging heut Morgen übers feld song from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen out of which Mahler builds his first movement. From there, the orchestra breathed with ease and relaxed power, with fine string playing through all desks. The second movement was all joy and life, with a gusto-laded glissando in the old style for the main tune in the strings. The trio established a charming sense of limp, drunken overripeness, with violins sliding down delicately in the first measures.
Bassist Andrew Angelin played his solo at the opening of the third movement beautifully, and the orchestra built the funeral-march mood steadily and well, and as I’ve noted, entered fully into the spirit of the klezmer outburst that follows. The contrasting section, though, which is the final section of another Gesellen song, Die zwei blauen Augen, was simply arrived at rather than prepared, and this isn’t the kind of music in which that approach works. There needs to be a wide contrast, just as there is in the song, with the gloom of the opening and the radiance of the close.
The finale featured some of the best playing of the night, with precise ensemble and gut-punching force in the moments of highest drama. Here again, though, the initial statement of the brass fanfare that will anchor the ultimate climax went by without sufficient emphasis, and in the reprise of the slow second subject, in which Mahler calls for the music to be “even wider than before,” there wasn’t enough breadth for the music to make its impact; the beat went on, mercilessly driving toward the end.
Still, it was a thrilling performance overall, despite the glitches that kept it from the top shelf. The audience was buzzing audibly after each movement, and roared its approval at the end, and in truth, the Lynn Philharmonia and its conductor deserve much credit for carrying out this first regular concert of the season so capably.
And if you’re a fan of the Mahler First, this is a performance well worth attending, even if you don’t know what else it represents: an important step forward in the life of area music-making.
The Lynn Philharmonia plays this program again today at 4 p.m. in the Wold Performing Arts Center on the campus of Lynn University in Boca Raton. Tickets: $35-$50. Call 237-9000 or visit www.lynn.edu/tickets.