First performance of the season for the new music director & long sold out.
(But the silly girl's doing Mahler so no good to me)
(But the silly girl's doing Mahler so no good to me)
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Listened to the first half whilst in the bath. Excellent concert. -
Caught this on iPlayer; very fine concert, a good sign of the rapport between MG-T and the CBSO. Her compatriot's work made a nice opener (if obviously not a patch on its nominal 'companion piece' for inspiration, LvB 5). In her reading of Haydn 6 ("Le Matin"), I wonder if MG-T actually allowed some of the soloists to improvise passages, to try to go for "authentic performance practice" of a sort. Not sure about the one Bronx-cheer like dissonance just before heading off to its close.
Her reading of Mahler 1 was very good, a few minor brass blips aside. Some quirks of her interpretation included a protracted pause before the last chord of the slow movement, but then an immediate (almost literally so; one degree more than a simple attacca) jump into the finale. In the slow movement itself, MG-T had the opening double bass passage played by the entire double bass section, not simply the principal chair. Haitink did the same in Chicago in his Mahler 1 back in something like 2008 or so.
Her addition of an encore actually put me in mind of another Baltic conductor of a much earlier generation, Neeme Järvi, who became quite known during his US music directorships, in Detroit and Newark, NJ, with adding encores to his concerts, i.e. getting those audiences not to run out the doors to their cars right away (perhaps he did this with the Scottish National Orchestra as well, but I've no idea there). It seems extremely anti-climactic to add an encore after Mahler 1, but MG-T did, and it went well, after her brief speech to the audience before the encore. (OTOH, I once heard Järvi lead an encore with the NJSO after Beethoven 3, so who am I to judge.) She did lead an encore after her August CBSO and Proms concerts as well. Maybe for CBSO audiences, she'll make these encores 'standard operating practice' for her concerts.
BTW, from this side of the pond, there's a somewhat snarky, if accurate, commentary on the continual (because easier to pronounce, of course) use by commentators and others of her first name to refer to her, rather than saying "Maestra Gražinytė-Tyla" from James R. Oestreich in the NYT, on her recent NYC appearance, where she conducted Raminta Serksnyte's Fires with the Juilliard Orchestra, in addition to her CBSO performance:
"In an odd way, she is also riding the coattails of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Both, with surnames barely pronounceable by Anglophones, are being marketed by their first names, a further democratization of the waning mystique of the maestro: thus, Mirga and Yannick to you."Comment
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