Pacific Ends Season With Mahler Majesty

The Pacific Symphony ended its 1997-98 season, the eighth under Carl St.Clair, with a perfectly acceptable account of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Not too many years ago that would have seemed exceptional.

Mahler’s epic symphony is no small undertaking for any orchestra or conductor. It doesn’t have a poetic program, but it hardly needs one. Its struggles with life and death, with nostalgia and modernism, with love and laughter and horror, are all clear enough. Sometimes manic, sometimes arrestingly beautiful, sometimes just peculiar, it offers interpretive challenges to even the most experienced conductor of Mahler. Trumpet players dread its exposed opening solo. The greatest orchestras need to work themselves up for it.

A generation ago, a performance or recording of the Fifth was an occasion. Now it has become common. It seems to be more performed than even that most famous of all Fifths, Beethoven’s. The Los Angeles Philharmonic performs it often: two years ago at Ojai under Pierre Boulez, a year ago with Christoph Eschenbach. The Pasadena Symphony was impressive in it under Jorge Mester last season. There are now more than three dozen recordings of the symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas will begin a major Mahler Festival in San Francisco with the Fifth next week.

St.Clair’s approach to the symphony was a young man’s, and the playing was a young orchestra’s. There was, from Burnette Dillon’s confident opening trumpet solo, an emphasis on sentiment and sensation. Where Boulez exposed the symphony (finished the second year of the 20th century) as a great leap into a modern era or where Eschenbach unfolded elegant connections between the symphony’s mood swings, St.Clair conducted as if he had a finger glued to the italic key of a word processor.

The performance was slow yet busy enough to feel propulsive. The orchestra made its points through furious attacks. It was loud and exciting more often than it was lush or elegant. There was more intensity than depth. The famous Adagietto for strings and harp was done the old-fashioned Bernsteinian way--slow and mournful. The Finale, too, was more forceful than buoyant. But the playing was solid, if not always beautiful.

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The Fifth can easily stand alone, especially when it is drawn out to 75 minutes, as it was Wednesday. But for a particularly generous program, St.Clair also invited Thomas Hampson to sing Mahler’s early song cycle “Songs of a Wayfarer” and four numbers from Copland’s “Old American Songs.”

Hampson is a singer who seems to be just about everywhere these days, on the opera and recital stage, entering into various crossover projects, making sometimes embarrassingly self-serving and sentimental television shows. He is a fine singer, but one starts to distrust him.

No more, not after Wednesday’s commanding performances. This was singing that will not be forgotten. Hampson’s voice never sounded more powerful or secure, nor his interpretations more authoritative. Nearly all the mannerism was gone, and in its place was sheer expression, an attention to the meaning of every word, to the exact tone of every pitch. He seemed to practically become Mahler himself, who wrote so poignantly in these songs about his thwarted young love.

A famous Copland song, “Simple Gifts,” was also a perfect example of the extraordinary character of Hampson’s art on this occasion. This Shaker hymn in praise of directness and immediacy is set by Copland with admirable attention to its sentiment. Hampson, however, was anything but simple in his performance. He was cultivated, stentorian, carefully emotive, inspiring. He had the character of a great orator or great actor, telling us important truths that seem evident but need emphasis anyway.

After the Copland songs, the audience wouldn’t, couldn’t stop applauding, even once the orchestra got up to leave the stage. We had to hear this one more time. Like a fabulous magician repeating his best trick, Hampson then made “Simple Gifts” seem all the more astounding on repetition. We still couldn’t quite believe our ears.