A Baton Leads Baltimore Into a New Era
BALTIMORE, Sept. 29 — Conducting her first subscription-series program at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra here on Friday night, Marin Alsop received two prolonged standing ovations.
Marin Alsop conducting at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore.
The one that mattered most came at the end of this season-opening concert, an ambitious program that intriguingly paired two volatile works: John Adams’s “Fearful Symmetries,” followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Ms. Alsop, who turns 51 in October, looked as dapper and dynamic as ever in her customary black slacks and stylish jacket. She drew incisive, vibrant and richly colored accounts of both works from the Baltimore players.
But the ovation that must have been especially gratifying came at the start of the evening, when she arrived onstage, and so became the first woman to hold a music director’s post at a major American orchestra. She placed a hand to her heart and seemed a little overcome, understandable given the obstacles she faced when her appointment was announced in July 2005.
At the time the orchestra was mired in debt, demoralized and bleeding subscribers. When the board said that Ms. Alsop would replace the brilliant, tradition-bound Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov as music director, many players publicly voiced doubts about her artistry and complained that they had been shut out of the search process.
What a difference two years has made. As director-designate Ms. Alsop reinvigorated the orchestra, institutionally and artistically. A born communicator and effective proselytizer for music, she has led a major community-outreach effort and taken the orchestra back into the recording business for the first time in a decade. A new Sony Classical release with Ms. Alsop conducting the violinist Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony in John Corigliano’s “Red Violin” Concerto took the top spot on the Billboard classical chart in September. The Naxos label plans to release a three-disc set of Dvorak symphonies taken from live performances by Ms. Alsop and the orchestra.
Thanks to a $1 million grant, the Baltimore Symphony this season is offering all tickets to subscribers at $25 a concert. (I am continually amazed at the impact that a sum like $1 million, just pocket change in popular culture, can have in classical music.) In a new venture, XM Satellite Radio is broadcasting eight Baltimore Symphony programs this season. Attendance, which had dipped to about 60 percent of capacity before Ms. Alsop’s appointment, is confidently expected to reach the high 70 percent range. Paul Meecham, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, has said Ms. Alsop was the impetus for the turnaround, proving that dynamic artistic leadership is the obvious answer to the troubles facing American orchestras.
None of this could have happened, though, had Ms. Alsop not won over the musicians. To judge by Friday’s concert, the second performance of this program (the first was on Thursday at the orchestra’s subsidiary home at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda), the players are enthused and confident.
With her kinetic conducting style and affinity for jazzy contemporary music, Ms. Alsop brings rhythmic verve to everything she performs. Not surprisingly, the tumultuous Mahler Fifth was robust and emphatic. Yet I was impressed and somewhat surprised by the breadth and structural clarity of this account.
The episodic first movement emerged as a heaving, inexorable apotheosis of a funeral march. The stormy second movement was arresting, but alive with nuance and detail. Ms. Alsop and her players conveyed the wayward turns and sardonic humor that lurk below the bucolic surface of the sprawling scherzo. Her direct, restrained approach to the beloved Adagietto would not have pleased those who experience this music as the ultimate in poignant expressivity. I found her intensely lyrical and unsentimental interpretation refreshing. Some of the bustling fugato passages in the finale were a little scrambled, but the performance had infectious exuberance and, over all, the musicians played brilliantly.
Mr. Adams’s “Fearful Symmetries” (1988) is a heady mix of ominous urgency and cheeky irreverence. It is inventively scored for plush orchestra, heavy on brass, with synthesizers to add some high-tech samplings of percussion sounds. This unrelenting, harmonically gritty 30-minute piece pays homage to breezy big-band jazz while pulsating with fear-inducing, hypnotic power. Ms. Alsop’s conducting was almost a choreographic interpretation of the music. She was alert to every metric shift and rhythmic riff throughout this exhilarating performance.
Baltimore audiences are going to hear quite a bit more music by living composers than they have recently. Starting her tenure with Mr. Adams’s work was a statement of purpose for Ms. Alsop and an invitation to adventure. Before the performance, an older woman sitting in front of me sounded dubious about “Fearful Symmetries.” After the performance, she was on her feet, shouting and waving her program in the air at Mr. Adams and Ms. Alsop.
So far, so good.
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