Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra emerged from their Metropolitan Opera pit onto the stage of Carnegie Hall last Thursday to strut their considerable stuff as a star attraction. It was a notably successful evening.
Nézet-Séguin has forged this group into a formidable ensemble. One can trace the sensitivity to phrasing and the ability to play solidly yet distinctly at vanishingly soft dynamic levels to their bread-and-butter work as accompanists, but the way the horn, full brass and string sections can be rich and meaty without being overpowering or grating is truly remarkable. The same can be said about the consistency of articulation between instrument families and (with rare exceptions) the sense of ensemble performance.
The Ricercata a 6 voci from Bach's Musical Offering, presented here in Anton Webern's pointillistic orchestration, came across as a mini-concerto for orchestra, a well-chosen opportunity to show off the group's rich sonic palette. The complexities of Bach's counterpoint necessarily take a back seat to the scintillating pleasures of the Klangfarbenmelodie in this arrangement, which strikes me as a fair trade; however, the couple of passages in which the feeling of pulse weakened notably were disappointing.
In a nod to their operatic roots, the Met Orchestra's Carnegie Hall appearances include singers, here soprano Lise Davidsen, who is a force of nature. Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder, while supposedly prefiguring some of the harmonic innovation of Tristan und Isolde, is not a major work, but in Davidsen and Nézet-Séguin's hands it was riveting. The orchestra are no less adept at accompanying onstage than they are in the pit. Davidsen's sense of direct communication rivaled the best cabaret singers I have heard. Her low notes are ridiculously powerful for a soprano (I am willing to blame the fact that they were occasionally covered on Felix Motti, who orchestrated four of the five songs), and as for the rest of her voice – well! I try to be more sophisticated even in my note-taking than just to write “OMG!”, but the musicality and the sheer shattering ring of her voice apparently reduced my literary faculties to just that level. She and the orchestra performed “Dich, teure Halle” from Tannhäuser as an encore, which was equally stunning.
The Met Orchestra's sonic treasures and phrasing were again the chief pleasures in Mahler's Symphony no. 5 in C sharp minor. This was not a rendition focused on architecture, or the imposition of structural logic on Mahler's fantastic juxtapositions of material; it was a vibrantly picaresque Dostoevsky novel of a symphony, with vivid characters appearing, arguing with one another and disappearing again.
There were, as in the Bach, a couple of passages that struck me as muddled or unbalanced, such as the climactic fury of the first movement, but most of it was extraordinary to listen to. Standing out for me were the softer moments, such as the cello section solos in the second movement, and those when the texture pared down to nearly nothing; I am not being ironic when I say that this performance included some of the most moving silences I've heard in a concert hall. Mention must be made of principal trumpet David Krauss, whose ominous, foreboding solo opened the symphony and tied together the first movement, and principal horn Brad Gemeinhardt, who stood for his role as the obbligato in the third movement. The end of a Mahler symphony is always a long time coming, but the clarity of the thickets of furious counterpoint at the beginning of the fifth movement, and that triumphant chorale that closes the piece, were worth the wait.
