Subtle Delights at MSO Concert

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Photo: Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

Matthew Annin

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra's Matthew Annin

It’s tricky business planning the penultimate concert of an orchestral season when your closer is something as titanic as Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. This preceding program seemed specially calibrated for a lack of earth-shaking effect to better magnify Mahler next week.

And yet there were subtle delights for patient listeners. Brahms’ Serenade No. 2, with its lack of violins, allowed a mellow tone to prevail. Former music director Edo de Waart conducted while seated, with his usual unshowy style. The third movement in particular was memorable for skillful shifts between major and minor mode, and for a lovely duet between oboe (Katherine Young Steele) and clarinet (Todd Levy).

The second half began with Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1, a youthful work with a well-written solo part. The MSO’s own Matthew Annin was confident and secure in the music. Solo horn with orchestra always sounds cinematic to me, and Annin projected an appropriately heroic sound. The audience responded heartily to the ending minutes with tricky fast triplets in the solo part.

In Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter”, the orchestra showed strong accents in the first movement and good dynamic contrasts. Maestro de Waart conveyed a sense of heft at structural tentpoles in this grandest of Mozart’s symphonies. I had forgotten the Andante second movement’s surprising dissonances; at times the music threatens to escape tonality completely before it’s pulled back from the edge. In the third movement, de Waart again projected a sense of scale, making it feel like not just another minuet. The finale was a true workout for the strings, and the MSO strings rose to the challenge. If any audience members hadn’t been compelled by the program thus far, surely they could get excited by Mozart’s musical puzzle here, re-arranging contrapuntal material into a high-energy tapestry.

Again, this concert stood in the shadow of Mahler to come, but it was a well-played offering of smaller forces. And it had the effect of making Mozart’s “Jupiter” feel like a big deal, which it deserves.