ORLANDO, Fla. — It was a turbulent night at Steinmetz Hall, full of orchestral swells, deep rumblings, and colossal fortes, as Amsterdam’s revered Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performed Nov. 18 in Central Florida on the first night of its six-date U.S. tour with conductor Klaus Mäkelä that culminates on Nov. 22 and 23 at Carnegie Hall and on Nov. 24 at the Kennedy Center, presented by Washington Performing Arts.
Mäkelä proved a superb leader: He is the 28-year-old chief conductor-designate of the Concertgebouw, whose post as its eighth artistic leader doesn’t officially begin until 2027, the same year he also takes the reins of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as its 11th music director.
At Steinmetz, Mäkelä was energetic, insightful, and inspired, communicating clearly and effectively with the musicians, who were in turn empowered to draw out grand, sweeping narratives in service of two works: Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, for the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, known as the Titan.
Transfigured Night, in Schoenberg’s own string-orchestra arrangement of the original string sextet from 1899, was a masterclass in group interplay among the smooth, silken ensemble, with Vesko Eschkenazy as concertmaster. The players were flexible, sensitive, and attuned to each other and to the cues from Mäkelä, who conducted from memory, stooping over the edge of the podium during the most fervent passages to shape immaculate phrasing. Together, they took Orlando on an emotional ride made of sorrow, despair, joy, and the shattering revelation the work’s title alludes to.
The viola section, led by principal Santa Vižine, had an amber, wooden tone, a shade darker than in other orchestras, which helped capture the nighttime scene of Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name that inspired Schoenberg. Walking in a forest at night, a woman confesses to her partner that she is carrying another man’s child. The half-hour program piece follows the poem, but even if you didn’t know that, the flow, drama, and narrative arc of Mäkelä’s interpretation made the piece stand on its own as pure music.
From the beginning, the dynamics followed the trajectory of Mäkelä’s vision for the piece so that the music was never too quiet or too loud too soon. That made for an alarming, rumbling entrance of the double basses (the only instrument not in the sextet version) and a poignant lyrical theme, starting on the cellos, at the beginning of the second half. The crescendos and ensemble fortes were as perfectly sculpted as you could hope for, as Schoenberg ingeniously reconciles lyrical Romanticism with chromatic Modernism.
In the soft shimmering of the last few measures, after the man tells his lover that he accepts her despite the circumstances, there was as clear a musical depiction of a saintly aura as I’ve ever heard. The audience held applause during the fraught few seconds after the last notes died out.
If Mäkelä internalized Transfigured Night to deliver a passionate, personal reading, he seemed comfortable taking a back seat for the Mahler, trusting the logic and magic of the score, which he used this time. That’s not to say he didn’t have an interpretive voice: He was in full control of the 100-odd-piece orchestra from the serene drone that opens the symphony, taking a moderate tempo that allowed the initial pastoral motifs in descending fourths to breathe. He infused the trio section of the second movement with a playful lilt, which underscored the difference between the trio and the ländler that bookends it. And in the finale, he achieved a distinct, clean sound during the eerie, intrusive fragments that echo the motifs from the first movement in a way that delays the composer’s journey back to the symphony’s home key of D major. Overall, you could hear a chiseled and muscular blend of instrumental forces.
It was a majestic reading, at once faithful to the score and benefiting much from the pristine acoustics at Steinmetz Hall. The climax of the first movement was thunderous, though still refined, in a manner that only makes sense when performed by an orchestra of this caliber. When the minor-key “Frère Jacques” round returns for a second time in the third movement, notorious for unsettling the conservative audience at the 1889 premiere in Budapest, the solo clarinet was garish and jeering, contributing to the discomfiting juxtapositions — the grotesque and the lyrical, the unpredictable tumult of life — that jarred those early listeners. Toward the end of the finale, when that effulgent D-major chord crashes in, Mäkelä beamed a warm smile and bobbed his head along.
The two long pieces left no room for a concert opener by a contemporary composer, though this weekend in New York City and Washington, D.C., the orchestra is giving the American premiere of Body Cosmic by Ellen Reid, whose opera p r i s m received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best New Opera award the same year.
The Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts’ campaign to bring world-class orchestras to Steinmetz, its premier acoustic hall — long after the Festival of the Orchestras, which ran for 27 years, closed shop in 2011 — is commendable. It’s just too bad that it chooses to make no room for program notes in the concert playbills, which is standard for the presenting organization to commission. Other than the titles, there was nothing about the poem behind Transfigured Night or the fascinating history of the Symphony No. 1. Not even just the movements. Nothing.
The arts center’s visiting orchestras series continues with the return of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Jan. 18 under Riccardo Muti and the London Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 26 led by Antonio Pappano.
