A birthday retrospective in Boston: Andris Nelsons and the BSO perform Debussy and Mahler

Every 125–year-old deserves a glow-up, even Boston’s Symphony Hall. The foyers and corridors now boast a brighter-hued coat of paint, new carpeting and lighting, plus large format black and white photos replacing the display cases and a murky copy of the John Singer Sargent portrait of orchestra founder and funder, Henry Lee Higginson. Patrons can even enjoy celebratory cocktails created specifically for this anniversary. 

Although some in 1900, including the building’s architect, Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead and White fame, had misgivings about the hall’s austerity and the impression a spare, red brick basilica would have on Gilded Age audiences, Higginson and acoustician Wallace Sabine’s focus on the musical experience rather than decorative display proved providential, resulting in a hall, that might, in McKim’s words, have looked like “a deaf, dumb, and blind institution” but was a marvel of acoustics, considered by many conductors and musicians the equal to or second only to Vienna’s Musikverein.

Musically, Symphony Hall’s birthday will vie with the nation’s as the guiding principle for programming this season. This was one of the first programs organized around works contemporaneous to the hall’s opening and first season: Debussy’s Nocturnes and Mahler’s Symphony no. 4 (both 1901). The next will replicate the inaugural concert of 15th October 1900 with Beethoven’s Missa solemnis.

Nuages begins with a phrase from clarinets and bassoons suggestive to some ears of the Dies irae. It and the English horn’s interventions add a somber tinge which Andris Nelsons used to tint Debussy’s muted “study in grey”. Nuanced shading and dynamics plus seamless phrasing immersed the hall in billowing clouds of mist and the listener in an eerie dream world of sleepwalkers troubled by things that go bump in the night. Fêtes dispelled those clouds with a shaft of light, restoring a sense of time and space with propulsive, animated rhythms driving to a festive conclusion. The blended voices of the Lorelei Ensemble, placed along the side wall behind the strings, floated above them and beckoned with their sirens’s call from a world of enchantment and wonder, a limbo of forgetfulness, which the balance and blend Nelsons maintained throughout the Nocturnes here helped create.

After this tour de force display of poise and refinement, hopes ran high for Mahler’s most intimate symphony. While individual movements had their moments, the subtlety and delicacy required for the parts to coalesce into a whole were not sufficiently present. The balance and variety of dynamics and shading which were hallmarks of Nocturnes were too often absent, resulting in a coarse, bombastic quality in the first two movements and robbing the second of the full effect of the concertmaster’s switching back and forth from the scordatura violin. Even though Nelsons lingered at times, the third movement still came closest to the refinement of Nocturnes and the feeling of intimacy so central to this symphony. Nikola Hillebrand’s pure-toned, bright soprano and straightforward, wide-eyed delivery of the text came further to the rescue in the final movement, embodying the naïveté of the child’s view of life in Heaven with its sense of wonder and joy untainted by the slaughter of animals entailed. Sometimes in Mahler symphonies, Nelsons seems to lose focus A better balance between making a point and letting the music speak for itself might be helpful.