Orchestra's skill carries challenging program

SARASOTA - Leonard Slatkin has a reputation as an orchestra builder and as one of the best American conductors.

Listening to him lead the National Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday before a capacity crowd at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, it was evident how well-deserved that reputation is.

For a tour of three Florida cities, Slatkin, the orchestra's music director for seven years, has put together a program that not only displays the orchestra's virtuosity but also challenges listeners.

Tuesday began with the Roman Carnival Overture by Berlioz, followed by Three Places in New England by Ives and the Beethoven Symphony No. 3, Eroica, as "edited" by Gustav Mahler.

The overture set the standard very high. The 100 musicians played with sensitivity, incredible precision and a tonal sheen in the strings and winds.

Slatkin spoke about the Ives work as if to prepare the audience for its modern idioms and a textural density sometimes impossible for the ear to unscramble, despite the maestro's efforts at clarity. This full-orchestra version was first performed 20 years after the composer's death in 1954.

The music is evocative and beautifully structured, though it tends to ramble from mood to mood. The performance was of such a high quality as to deserve capturing in a recording.

A similarly wonderful level of playing did not save Beethoven from Mahler's adoring, yet destructive impulses. Slatkin explained that Mahler, as a conductor, wanted to help clarify and balance the sounds of more modern instruments playing in much larger halls. But his biases as a composer added distortions to the work.

As the symphony began, the changes seemed organic and integrated into the fabric of the music. But as the first movement unfolded, the Mahler effects became more startling and disturbing.

For example, at a climactic moment in the recapitulation, he introduced a luftpause, a moment of silence. Though that gimmick was sensational in the last movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 1, it was a wrenching break in the momentum in Eroica. Throughout the work, usually at critical points of musical tension, the pace was slowed, disrupting the rhythmic flow so as to leave one infuriated, not enlightened, notwithstanding the spectacular sounds of the orchestra.

- Albert H. Cohen can be reached by e-mail at ahc@bloomberg.net

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