Trumpeter Michael Tiscione, conductor Peter Oundjian and pianist Inon Barnatan at Thursday’s ASO concert. (Photos by Rand Lines)
For a season that saw the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra tackling eight of Beethoven’s nine symphonies and all the raging fury they contain, Thursday’s concert was the orchestra ending the season not with a bang but a contented sigh. The ASO closes out its 2024-25 season with Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, op. 35, by Dmitri Shostakovich and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E minor (Song of the Night). There’s one more performance on Saturday, June 7.
The Shostakovich concerto opened the night and proved to be the evening’s high point. Shostakovich is a composer who knows how to lean into the silky smooth, jazz age panache that was popular in his day without abandoning the structural depth of his classical predecessors like Brahms and Beethoven. This makes him a kind of thinking man’s George Gershwin: poppy but still deep nonetheless. He may not have anything in his catalog that’s as suffocatingly overplayed as Rhapsody in Blue (arguably the “Wonderwall” of the classical world), but that just keeps him from wearing out his welcome.
In the context of Thursday night, that intellectual pop sensibility paid off with an opening half that was a feast for the ears. The ASO was joined by three prominent features: conductor Peter Oundjian (who helmed the podium throughout the night), pianist Inon Barnatan and the ASO’s own Michael Tiscione on trumpet. The trio solidified the concerto with the kind of deep cohesion that feels like the work of celestial alignment.
Conductor Peter Oundjian
Central to that interplay is a keen understanding of the nature of the material, and that begins with Oundjian. He conducts with that lush, sculptural gravitas that one traditionally associates with vintage radio and television orchestras — exactly the kind of ensemble that would have handled the sort of music Shostakovich was channeling in his writing process. Oundjian is widely recognized for his conducting of Ralph Vaughan Williams, a contemporary of Shostakovich. As such, there was an effortless fusion of conductor with time period and that awareness cascaded across the ensemble.
Barnatan’s technical prowess is tempered by a gentle jazz touch that maintains aura and atmosphere even across virtuosic runs, but it was in the softer, quieter statements that his delicate control really shined. He and Tiscione were the perfect foils to each other and captured that majestic interweaving of the jazz age and its classical ancestry with all the trans-dimensional respect it deserved.
With so much promise built up in the first half, it was a shame that the second half ended up being lackadaisical. That’s not the ASO’s fault — they handled Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with all the elegant savoir faire the occasion demanded. The problem is that Mahler wrote the work about 40 minutes longer than it needed to be, and even the most adept orchestra can’t compensate for a lack of engaging material.
That’s not to say that the work is a total loss: It opens with the kind of aggressively dense chordal harmonies that Mahler is known for and showcases plenty of oddly metered phrases that get tossed from one instrument to the next at unexpected intervals. Those are the kind of aggressive, disarming turns we expect from Mahler at his best, but their impact is blunted by endless ostinatos that seem to do little more than vamp for time. They have neither the hypnotic surrealism of Philip Glass nor the belligerent punkishness of John Cage — instead, they just kind of float, aimless and (seemingly) endless.
“It’s just so long,” I heard someone behind me moan after quite a few people had gotten up and walked out midway through the piece. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one in the audience that’s nonplussed by a work simply because listening critically is taking me out of the artistry of the piece. That definitely wasn’t the case tonight.
A critical insight into the pairing of these two pieces can be found in the program notes, which claim that both composers are presenting parodies of previous musical styles. That doesn’t quite feel accurate in either case. Shostakovich isn’t poking fun at the template Gershwin established a decade prior — he’s making love to it. Mahler, on the other hand, is definitely having a laugh, but someone needed to remind him that brevity is the soul of wit.
The ASO would probably have done well to go ahead and end the season with Beethoven’s triumphant Ninth Symphony rather than holding it to kick off in the fall. As it stands, the June 5 concert raised questions about whether the proverbial glass was half full or half empty, but, either way, it wasn’t quite as thirst-quenching as it could have been.
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