Gabel makes a solid impression with Mahler's 5th

Fabien Gabel’s debut conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s 5th Symphony makes a solid impression. Noah Bendix-Balgley's Klezmer Concerto also makes an impression, and it's not so good.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had big shoes to fill (at least to these ears), presenting Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at Strathmore six days after the world-class Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal did it at the Kennedy Center. But the orchestra met the Himalayan challenge with aplomb on Sunday, even if some things were on the blowsy side. Making his debut with the orchestra was 47-year-old Fabien Gabel, a Frenchman with a solid if not top-tier career in Europe. Though he does not currently have a music directorship, he’s guested with the Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony. On the strength of this performance, I hope he will be invited back regularly.  

As I mentioned in an earlier review, Mahler is the ultimate challenge for an orchestra; no other composer makes such ferocious demands on each player, but whose challenges stimulate and inspire. Plenty of modern composers have written still harder music, but the difficulties are gratuitous and the payoff (if the notes are even audible) is simply as another drip in a Jackson Pollock painting. Orchestra musicians will start working on their Mahler parts weeks or even months ahead of time, because they know that all the details matter; the arduous passages fit tightly into a blazing artistic vision of which the entire orchestra partakes. Thus it is that every player brings his or her A game for this composer, and it is in his music where you can really gauge a group’s level.  

The BSO is on uncertain footing at present; in an interregnum between the inconsistent achievements of the Marin Alsop regime to a new, little-known name taking over next year, many key vacancies in the orchestra, and financial difficulties that cloud its future. I seem to see some new/different faces at each performance. But it was clear yesterday that everyone was giving their all, and I’d have to say the gap in quality between that performance and Montréal’s was far narrower than I expected. Good discipline in the strings (when they could be heard), and solid solo lines from all the principals. 

Part of that success must of course go to Gabel. It was a middle-of-the-road interpretation, in the best sense -- between the clinical x-ray of the score that one heard from Pierre Boulez and the heavy slobbering that one could get from Giuseppe Sinopoli or Bernstein. Mahler integrates high and low art in a way that no composer did before him and only Shostakovich attempted to afterwards. Some interpreters almost make a fetish of the kitschy or piggish elements, perhaps to set the numinous parts in higher relief. Others downplay or even recoil from them. Gabel, again, struck a nice balance, playing the schmaltzy sections with affection but without going overboard. The Adagietto was deeply-felt without dawdling; and while the tempo in the riotous finale was a shade cautious, it allowed us to hear more notes. Although he could not solve the brass-heavy balance problems inherent in the score (important string lines overwhelmed too often), Gabel led the musicians with detailed mastery, anticipating the constant tempo and mood-changes with authority, and always bringing out the most highly-expressive lines. 

I will say that after my praise of the Montréal conductor standing still and allowing the trumpet to start the piece on his own, the counter-argument was illustrated yesterday; Gabel, too, stood motionless as the symphony began, but the BSO trumpeter took a tempo for the fanfare that bore no relation to its pace anywhere else in the movement (long pauses between phrases). Otherwise, this rendition, overall, was deeper than last week’s, and I offer kudos to all.

Speaking of schmaltz, it was a clever idea, on paper, to open the concert with Fidl-Fantazye: A Klezmer Concerto by Noah Bendix-Balgley. Part of me is in awe-of course; how the concertmaster of the towering Berlin Philharmonic finds the time in addition to his orchestra duties to compose, learn, and tour with a difficult virtuoso work is a mystery. But Bendix-Balgley did, somehow; and if nothing else, he brought us top-tier fiddling. He joins an extremely rare cohort including Wolfgang Schneiderhan in Vienna, Herman Krebbers in Amsterdam, and Joseph Silverstein in Boston – orchestra concertmasters who made numerous acclaimed recordings of major repertoire and whose playing could stand comparison with any soloist.

 How I wish this fine artist had offered us something other than this vanity project; his piece, while enjoyable for the virtuosity it afforded him, was otherwise beneath everyone onstage. The brass parts sounded like he simply put a book of 1950’s Jewish wedding music on their stands, and the keening melodies of the slower middle section went on way too long. The fact that he threw in little fragments of melodies from the Mahler along the way almost made it worse.

Photo: Stéphane Bourgeois