An outstanding performance: Andris Nelsons’ first opening night at Tanglewood

Normally, opening galas schedule lighter fare, suitable for patrons that are not necessarily the most knowledgeable and selective music lovers. That was not the case on Friday night, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Andris Nelsons, opened the 2017 Tanglewood Music Festival. Ready for a celebratory evening, the audience had to sit through a ninety-minute-long rendition of Mahler’s Symphony No.2 in C minor, one of the most challenging – for both interpreters and public – works in the orchestral repertoire.

I was certainly expecting an immensely talented conductor mastering without fault the heap of contradictions – faith and doubt, joy and sorrow, mundane and spiritual, references to klezmer music and to Dies Irae – that are prevalent in this music. What was amazing though, was the way that such a young maestro – Nelsons is not yet forty – grasped the essence of Mahler’s spiritual quest in coming to terms with life’s challenges. Moreover, he succeeded to maintain the cohesiveness of this gigantic metaphorical journey, from questions to answers, composed over a period of six years. The score is full of both hints of things to come and backwards looking musical moments and the conductor took great care to underline all these links. This was a very mature and balanced rendition, far from the passionate outbursts, exaggerated rubatoes, and heart on the sleeve approach of, say, Leonard Bernstein’s performance from 1949 with this very orchestra.

One doesn’t need big, emphatic gestures to point out essential elements of the score. From the beginning of the Allegro maestoso, with its lower chords’ dramatic roaring, Andris Nelsons constructed with tremendous discipline a level of dramatic tension that he maintained throughout the entire modified sonata form and beyond. His vision was less about the solemnity of “a hero succumbing to fate and death” but about doubts and changes of mood. When Mahler decided to reuse his several years-old “Todtenfeier” as the opening of the Second Symphony, Sigmund Freud was publishing one of his early studies – Obsessions and Phobias – and investigating the “inner life” started to be a main goal for both science and art. The mental tribulations the hero goes through in trying to redeem himself, to achieve an inner peace, become more interesting, at the fin de siècle, than the moment when the sublime goal is attained. Dark undercurrents are a constant presence in this music. The man at the helm made sure that the audience was well aware not only of the stridently anguished climaxes but also of the unruly suggestions upsetting the calm waters of the gentle, full-of-lyricism Ländler – a sign that death and sorrow have not yet been fully pushed aside.

As uniformly noteworthy as this performance was, there were several moments that I particularly cherished: the menacing horns on top of the semitone descending, unison playing harps, cellos and basses towards the end of the Allegro maestoso; the trumpets’ intervention in the third movement, a symphonic version of a Des Knaben Wunderhorn lied about Saint Anthony of Padua’s sermon to the fishes that, overall, should have sounded more sardonic than it did; the transparency of the frequent metric changes in the hymn-like “Uhrlicht”, another musical setting of one of the Wunderhorn songs.

In their limited but essential active presence, the two vocal soloists were good but not fully convincing. Mezzo Bernarda Fink, with a deep, elegant voice, reminiscent at times of Dame Janet Baker’s, was a little too distant in “Uhrlicht”. Soprano Malin Christensson, in an even smaller role, had to cope with the difficulties of making her voice penetrate the thick layers of orchestration. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, prepared by its new conductor, James Burton, was as assured and sung with the same nuanced approach as it did, for years, for its founder and now conductor laureate, John Oliver. Their initial Auferstehen/Rise again was marvelously soft.

The performance, Nelsons’ first ever opening night at the Tanglewood Festival, was outstanding. One can only hope that the other concerts that Andris Nelsons will conduct in his four weeks at Tanglewood this summer will be equally remarkable.