Several factors impact a classical concert, and the interplay of the various elements can be an endlessly intriguing mystery. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert of Scandinavian music I heard last Friday evening didn’t add up, despite some worthy aspects.
I hope it is no slight to any performer to say that a classical audience primarily responds first to the composition being played and secondly to the performance of that composition—as well as performer personality and temperament, acoustics, venue, general audience atmosphere, visuals, physical comfort, etc. This came to mind as I listened to Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2. The MSO played at its usual high standard, brought to anything since the mid-De Waart era. But it wasn’t even close to the orchestra at its best.
Guest conductor Anu Tali seemed to be simply walking through this stirring symphony. What I heard was more or less a shapeless “play through,” with the orchestra carrying the conductor through it. In my opinion, the response of the audience was to the soaring grandness of the score of this symphony, not to its competent but undistinguished performance.
Edvard Grieg’s five-movement Holberg Suite for strings was pleasant enough, but suffered from the same issues heard in the Sibelius symphony. The sound of the MSO strings was as good as ever, but the performance was unformed and without sharpness. Tali gave vague aesthetic leadership from the podium.
MSO principal flutist Sonora Slocum has become an integral part of the current MSO sound; I’ve always very much liked her playing and looked forward to hearing her in Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra. She played with elegant ease—without any detectable effort in the sound—even in the most intricate and fleeting passages. Her tone was warm and absolutely clean, produced without any strain and carried easily into the hall. I admired the sophistication of this interpretation, with hints of brilliance without being the least bit showy. As an encore, Slocum gave a graceful account of a movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Solo Partita in A Minor, rendered with a masterful feeling for phrase.
