Mahler Gets Expert Handling From Music Academy Players

With all due respect to the ranks of student orchestras, few inspire audiences outside the friends-and-family contingent to go out of their way to hear them. But one such stunning student orchestra is just up the road, as part of Santa Barbara’s annual Music Academy of the West summer program. The Festival Orchestra concert series kicked off at the Lobero Theater on Saturday with a grand, nicely detailed Mahlerian flourish.

As much as the previous week’s opener--an alumni benefit concert featuring pianist Martin Katz, Marilyn Horne and others--was a smorgasbord affair, this concert was all of a piece, being Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Conductor Roberto Abbado, a credit to his musical family line, led the fresh-faced charges in a spirited performance. Most of the time, with eyes closed, this orchestra--though a tender-aged ensemble with shifting personnel from year to year--could pass for a fine and seasoned orchestra.

Written in the summer of 1905, this music makes for fine summer listening fare. If Mahler’s symphonies are self-contained little worlds of textures and narrative notions, the Seventh is an overall pleasant place to visit. A gentle spirit prevails in the middle movements, framed by harsher stuff in the outer movements--alternating bombast and melancholy in the first and a pretty puzzle of fragments, basted with satire, in the fifth.

Apart from some intonational roughness at the opening movement, Abbado and company gave a big, lucid account of the symphony and drew the listener effectively into Mahler’s little world. They particularly shone while capturing the insinuating energy of the scherzo, a frustrated waltz with glints of humor, and the blithe tension of the fourth movement, with its disarming entrance of a mandolin from the wings (played by Joseph Jewell, one of the few nonstudents on stage).

As the cliche goes, they played with maturity and cohesion beyond their years. Or should we be adjusting the parameters of what constitutes tender youth in this musical era?