Mahler’s Sixth Showcases Long Beach’s Growth

JoAnn Falletta and the Long Beach Symphony have, through seasons past, been taking the measure of Mahler--and vice versa, of course. With Falletta now in her final season as music director of the orchestra, her Mahler cycle--and its tense, gleaming installment Saturday at Terrace Theater, the Sixth Symphony--also stands as something of a yardstick to measure the impressive artistic growth in Long Beach over the last decade.

The Sixth was a symphony about which Mahler had second and third thoughts; he subsequently deleted the “Tragic” title he had initially bestowed upon the work, for example. For the most part, Falletta accepted the composer’s later musical judgments, in a poised, passionate and thoroughly respectful reading.

Its oddest aspect, in fact, was the sound of the cowbells Mahler included in his large percussion battery. Instead of coming from the distance as the composer prescribed, Falletta’s sampled-sounding bells were very much in the sonic foreground.

*

Yet Falletta’s was also a quintessentially urban and American--but definitely post-Bernstein--interpretation. Aggressively expressive but never sentimental, it stressed struggle rather than fate, with glory still a real possibility almost to the end. In this heroic context, the final subsidence seemed close to inconsistent rather than inevitable.

Even in the most desperate of the pre-Falletta years, the Long Beach Symphony was not a bad band, and now it is very good indeed. It does not have the deep, broad, spacious sound of the European Mahler tradition, but it has a muscular energy and firm focus all its own, well-suited to Falletta’s purposes. Woodwind intonation--particularly clarinet proved persistently problematic this time out, but otherwise the playing was brightly polished and responsive.

Mahler symphonies offer engagement for a small army of orchestral soloists. Chief among them here, perhaps, was principal horn Calvin Smith, who brought burnished sound and soaring spirit to his crucial work. Concertmaster Roger Wilkie, principal oboe Leslie Reed and English horn player Joan Elardo also contributed distinguished performances, and the list could be extended down virtually the entire roster of principals.