Diemecke Ends Season on Bold Note

Enrique Arturo Diemecke ended a curious first season as music director of the Long Beach Symphony on Saturday night. It was curious because the Mexican conductor, who also heads orchestras in Mexico City and Michigan, was hired in Long Beach last year after the orchestra had chosen the season’s programs. Still, Diemecke was able to make some changes for this final one at Terrace Theater.

He began the evening with Silvestre Revueltas’ savage “Sensemaya.” He concluded with a flamboyant and reckless performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that couldn’t have been more different from the carefully gauged and well-executed Mahler interpretations that were a specialty of his unflamboyant predecessor, JoAnn Falletta. “Music With Passion” is now the motto on the orchestra’s brochure, and it uses a publicity shot that makes Diemecke look more like Las Vegas magician than conductor.

One excellent magic trick that Diemecke could perform would be to transform Long Beach into a center for Mexican music. Now and then, the Los Angeles Philharmonic or the Santa Barbara Symphony performs something by Revueltas or Chavez, Mexico’s most famous 20th century composers. But remarkably little of a very rich Mexican musical tradition and active current scene seems to make its way to Southern California where, by all rights, it should thrive.

Diemecke has made a series of recordings for Sony devoted to Mexican classics with his National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, but they are not imported to the U.S. However, two, with big Revueltas works, were for sale Saturday. They are big sellers in Mexico and for good reason. The music is riveting, and the performances are full of bold personality.

A sense of that personality could be felt in Diemecke’s reading of “Sensemaya,” which describes the ritual slaughter of a snake. The snake slithers in an insinuatingly sexy ostinato figure; the orchestra pounces with increasingly frenzied violence. The slithering on Saturday was alluring; the pounce, though, seemed a touch restrained, held back by hesitant brass.

There was nothing held back in the Mahler. Diemecke’s ideas about this symphony are his own. As in “Sensemaya,” he conducted without a baton and from memory. But here he seemed almost to be making it up as he went along.

Mahler gives a great many directions in his score, such as when to push ahead or hold back. With a heavy foot on the pedal and on the brake, Diemecke exaggerated all those and made up many more. If a melody rises and takes a dip, that could be the occasion to step on it and then slow down.

Diemecke favored in-your-face brass playing, and trumpets seemed at times about to careen out of control. The conductor is not the first to find hints of klezmer in the Scherzo movement, but he is the first to highlight them quite so raucously.

Ever wanting more, Diemecke added the nostalgic “Blumine” movement that Mahler first included in the symphony but later excised.

For Diemecke, the flowers Mahler was referring to in the title (the symphony was originally intended as a nature portrait) had psychedelic properties. Mahler never hesitated to milk the closing of his symphonies but leave it to Diemecke to double the fat content of the glorious peroration to the First.

Compared with the sleek performance of the same symphony that Esa-Pekka Salonen led with the Los Angeles Philharmonic two weeks ago, Diemecke’s reading proved downright perilous; he courted danger with his orchestra more than once.

I was reminded of the Ferris wheel that used to be in an amusement park near where the Terrace Theater now stands. It was a spectacular ride but not a safe one; every now and then someone was killed on it. Still, it may not be a bad thing to have a little of that seedy excitement returned to gentrified Long Beach.

Certainly, the precarious Mahlerian wild ride was preferable to the dutiful, dispirited performance of Richard Strauss’ First Horn Concerto, which was also on the program. Calvin Smith, the orchestra’s principal horn, was soloist.

Next season is Diemecke’s own. Long Beach, look out!