MUSIC REVIEW : Mahler Without the Sweat and Tears

Some conductors stomp, sway and dance up a storm when they confront the agonies, ecstasies and sprawling heroics of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.

Others seize the music to accompany a personal display of orgiastic frenzy.

Pierre Boulez doesn’t even seem to perspire.

Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the French maestro chose Mahler’s massive rhetoric to open a most welcome monthlong residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The performance, wildly applauded by a capacity audience, proved once again that understatement need not preclude brilliance or passion.

Boulez is no sentimentalist. He doesn’t seem to harbor the foggiest notion of self-indulgence. He obviously appreciates such simple virtues as clarity and propulsion.

In some conventional challenges, his analytical calm threatens to compromise the projection of romantic emotion. Restraint inhibits gutsy grandeur.

In Mahler, the gutsy grandeur is built into the score. Boulez sees no reason to belabor the obvious. He certainly doesn’t besmirch the recreative process with vulgarity.

Pathos, yes. Bathos, no.

His, by definition, is a thinking person’s Mahler: taut and brisk, energetic and clean.

Boulez does not follow the examples of certain Germanic titans. He favors neither the vast scope nor the broad scale dictated by the Mahler-as-superman tradition. Within carefully controlled expressive limits, his Mahler rises to generous climaxes yet musters a nice lyrical calm between the dramatic storms.

One can recall more elemental performances of the Fifth--performances in which the tragedy of the opening was more threatening, the jocularity of the scherzo more grotesque, the serenity of the beloved adagietto more ethereal. One certainly can remember performances in which the rondo finale rose to a more cataclysmic, and thus more cathartic, climax.

But one cannot recall many performances in which the complex melodic evolution seemed so simple, the fussy details so natural or so well integrated, the detours so telling. By avoiding all threats of exaggeration and distortion, by setting his eye and ear on only one cadence--the ultimate one--Boulez sustained tension over the long haul. In the process, he created and obeyed his own rules of narrative logic. It was illuminating, and it was refreshing.

The Philharmonic responded to his precise urgings with more bravado than bravura. Although some of the technical hurdles turned out to be a bit daunting, the spirit was always willing.

Boulez devoted the first half of the arduous, nicely contrasted program to Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Here, the orchestra played for him with extraordinary crispness complemented by nervy vitality.

At the beginning of the evening, Ernest Fleischmann, managing director of the Philharmonic, announced that Michele Zukovsky would play the clarinet movement of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour le fin de temps” in memory of the composer and “all those who so needlessly and tragically died in last week’s events in L.A.”

Zukovsky’s poignant solo was greeted by an ovation. The applause acknowledged her virtuosity but contradicted the essential solemnity of the tribute.