MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Daniel Lewis Bids Adieu to USC With a Blazing Mahler

With all the emotion attendant on Daniel Lewis’ final concert with the USC Symphony on Saturday--not in Bovard Auditorium, the orchestra’s gloomy campus home, but within the brightly welcoming confines of Ambassador Auditorium--it might not have been easy to notice that some spectacular music was being made by his charges.

It was fitting that for his USC Symphony valedictory, after 25 years of leadership, Lewis would set his 100-plus players the challenge of Mahler’s magnificently convoluted Sixth Symphony. And, as with numerous other savage, supposedly untamable beasts of the repertory through which he has led his young musicians in the past, the splendors of the music emerged with thrilling immediacy and often astonishing clarity.

One hesitates even to suggest the word professional here as a yardstick for measuring the gifts of the current edition of the USC Symphony: In the luscious washes of string sound produced throughout the evening and the sterling work of its oboe, clarinet and horn soloists, such distinctions became irrelevant.

The USC Symphony, whatever its membership over the past quarter-century--remember, this a body that changes with the tides of school admission and commencement--has shown the ability to make the grandeur of the grandest scores palpable, a matter chiefly of the players’ innate skills and spiritedness. That in the knottiest of scores--Mahler’s Sixth ranking high among them--they are able to project such a wealth of detail is the result of painstaking labor on the part of their conductor. Simply put, Daniel Lewis knows as much about the craft of conducting, part of which is the art of cajoling that last drop of dedication to vital minutiae from his musicians, as anyone alive.

Lewis has had a pool of gifted instrumentalists on which to draw over the years, but the consistency of their work during that period is the product of his inspired and inspiring leadership.

The best and worst of Mahler--it’s all there in the Sixth Symphony--was blazingly displayed on Saturday: in the hellish march, with brief excursions into a lyric paradise, of the opening movement; in a scherzo as brutal and multifaceted (with its half-dozen trios) as any within memory; in a gorgeously lush, but rhythmically mobile slow movement; and in an effusively unapologetic finale in which one could savor the Mahlerian detailing while simultaneously deploring (with a wink) the Mahlerian sprawl.

No holds barred. No prisoners taken. Warts and all. It was Mahler’s Sixth. It was glorious.

The 80-minute span of the symphony was followed by brief potent spoken accolades from Lewis’ USC colleagues as well as a City of Los Angeles proclamation made particularly meaningful by the musically informed tribute to Lewis from its presenter, Cultural Affairs Department spokesman Rodney Punt.

How and with whom the 70-year-old Lewis will continue his work has not been announced. That this event does not signal the end of a career is more than a wish; it’s akin to a prayer.

Lewis’ kind of fierce dedication to the highest standard of music-making, and his ability to achieve it, are never out of fashion--and next to impossible to find.