Courtesy of MSO
Last Friday evening, it was touching to see the warm audience welcome for Ken-David Masur, the new music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Clearly all there—conductor, orchestra and audience—have hopeful expectations for this new era at MSO.
There was an operatic bent to the program, with the Prelude to Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and a Suite from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Both showed Masur as an assured, communicative and expressive leader on the podium. Particularly in the Strauss suite, Masur’s personality came through with expansive sense of phrase and playfulness with the Viennese waltz. Without singers to accommodate, Masur took a luxuriously slow tempo in the famous Rosenkavalier “Trio.” Oboist Katherine Young Steele and violinist Frank Almond enchanted with lovely solos.
The 200th anniversary of the birth of the Clara Schumann was celebrated with the Concerto in A minor by her husband Robert Schumann, which was written for her. Pianist Nicolas Namoradze played with gentleness, exploring subtleties with graceful relish and stressing melody. Perhaps the performance was too understated, though. The overuse of ultra-soft playing started to sound a bit precious to my ears.
The music of German composer Detlev Glanert (b. 1960) was almost surely new to almost all listeners in this audience. Brahms-Fantasie, Heliogravure for Orchestra (2012) is a compositional reaction to Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 and appropriately shares with it a brooding mood. It’s admirable and finely crafted composition, and certainly Masur wants to perform newer music at MSO. But was this piece, with its long stretches of slow-moving evolution, the right choice for a season-opening concert?
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There was nothing wrong with any of the pieces chosen or the performances, but I don’t think the concert worked as a satisfying program. Masur explained in remarks that he chose the music for personal reasons. All well and good, but a season opener needs more festivity than this concert offered.
The orchestra really wants to play for Masur and sounded almost at its best. The audience certainly likes him. We all wish him great success in our city.
