Review- Transfigurative Mahler from the MSO

Gustav Mahler’s music is a lot of things, but the performance of his Fourth Symphony Friday was about textures and contrasts. Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra took the audience from earth to heaven in a journey that was as intensely reflective as it was tactile and rich. The cellos opened with lines that are warm as a winter fire. Muted brass adds a splash of sun. And winds purposefully squeak, suggesting a village band with definite klezmer overtones.  And a cackling violin solo erupts here and there (played with real verve by Frank Almond), a ghostly fiddler playing a death dance.  De Waart kept the music wonderfully balanced and precise, and never lost the spirit of longing that drives the symphony from beginning to end.
    In the third movement, that longing (and the shadows of mortality) become palpable. This was where de Waart and the orchestra really delivered: gorgeous aching string passages; Steven Colburn’s sadly lilting oboe; Almond’s violin again, this time ethereal rather than earthly. Eventually, the orchestra pulled together into a transfigurative embrace that takes us right to the pearly gates. Waukesha native Heidi Stober sang the song of the fourth movement with a tender and wide-eyed innocence. An appropriately heavenly performance from start to finish.
    De Waart opened the concert with Beethoven’s Third piano concerto, played by the young Chinese pianist Sa Chen. Both the soloist and the orchestra found the smooth, lyrical elegance in the Mozart-like lines, and the splashy bursts of romanticism that prefigure Beethoven’s more mature works. Sa’s first-movement cadenza, in fact, was something that even Liszt would be proud of.
    If you weren’t there Friday, make plans for Saturday night, when the concert will be repeated. You’ll understand why so many MSO musicians (as they’ve told me in the last few months) feel like the orchestra’s future is bright.