In May, the question for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Edo de Waart is not “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” but what you do once you’re there. Over the next two weeks, Milwaukee well get a taste of New York. This weekend’s program features music by Debussy and his modern disciple Olivier Messiaen (pieces that will be on the Carnegie program) and a symphony by Bruckner (which will not be heard in New York). Next weekend, the MSO will play Brahms’ Third Symphony and the other half of the Carnegie program, a Suite Concertante for traditional instruments by the 51-year-old Chinese composer Qigang Chen.
At first glance, de Waart’s choice of symphonic music from France and China might be surprising for a Dutch conductor leading musicians from a city with deep German roots. But the orchestra showed Friday that the program just might put its best sound forward.
Messiaen’s elegiac “The Forgotten Offerings” is a short but densely packed evocation of the final moments of Christ on the cross. More importantly for the orchestra, it allows several sections of the orchestra to step forward and shine. A long, sinuous string line marches calmly but relentlessly in unison, occasionally augmented with a woodwind ostinato or a biting upper harmony. It explodes in a flash of dissonance and percussion in a middle section, then returns to its ethereal calm. De Waart balanced the orchestra beautifully, and brought out beautifully warm and unified tone in the cellos during a soli passage. It’s a piece of wide emotional and dynamic range, but the orchestra and its conductor made it all make sense, even through the most stark and sudden transitions.
Transitions are a major part of Debussy’s La Mer, a tone-poem to the sea that mimics its open horizons and mercurial atmosphere. Here, de Waart emphasized the expanse of the music, opting to balance simultaneous motifs rather than let one rise into a traditional melody-accompaniment structure. The music seemed to envelop the ear and mind in a way that left you no choice but to toss about along with it. It was colorful, energized and infectious.
Bruckner’s symphonies are quite contrary to the ebb and flow of Debussy, towering edifices of structure and coherence that are a bit intimidating to conductor and listener alike. Bruckner’s symphonies don’t have the personality of Mahler (who conducted the first performance of this piece) but the Sixth Symphony is among the composer’s warmest and most colorful, and de Waart and the MSO brought great passion to sections of the nearly hour-long piece, particularly the gorgeous Adagio, where a section of long melodic development in the strings bursts into lush harmonies. While obviously less-rehearsed than the other pieces on the program, this performance showed the MSO is equally capable of the intellectual heft of Bruckner. It’s a shame there isn’t room for more music in the Carnegie program.
