September 28, 2024
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Nathalie Stutzmann, conductor; Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano; Samuel Hasselhorn, baritone.
Gustav MAHLER: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”)
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 6
Mark Gresham | 3 OCT 2024
Hurricane Helene brought widespread flooding, disruption, destruction, and tragedy to the American Southeast this past week. Initially making landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, it weakened but still brought severe weather to Georgia. By the time Helene reached Atlanta, it had downgraded to a tropical storm, but the region experienced significant rainfall, leading to flash flooding and power outages across multiple counties. The storm’s strong winds and heavy rain also disrupted transportation and flights, with the heaviest rains hitting from late September 26 through the early morning hours of September 27.
As the storm moved north, its eye passed east of Atlanta, with its center skirting just west of Athens, bringing significant weather impacts to cities in North Georgia. But it soon brought nearly unprecedented devastation in western North Carolina, most notoriously in the Asheville area. The tiny village of Chimney Rock, 20 miles away at a similar elevation of 2,280 feet, was wiped out.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra had been scheduled to perform on Thursday evening, September 26, at Symphony Hall but wisely canceled the concert earlier that day; the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta canceled their “Enchanted Harp” concert, scheduled for the following day at noon.
In the wake of the storm, several neighborhoods north of Atlanta Symphony Hall experienced damage. In the Peachtree Battle area, particularly around Bohler Road and Woodward Way, Peachtree Creek flooded, prompting multiple water rescues. Residents of Peachtree Park Apartments had to be evacuated by boat. Heavy rains added around 12 feet of water to the Chattahoochee River, exacerbating the flooding in low-lying areas along Peachtree Creek and Nancy Creek. Power outages affected over 30,000 homes across Fulton and DeKalb counties, and downed trees blocked numerous roadways, making travel hazardous. While Atlanta was spared the worst of the storm, damage overall was still substantial, particularly in flood-prone areas.
But the ASO did not cancel Friday night’s concert. (Typically, the ASO performs its second concert on a Saturday, but this particular weekend had Bernadette Peters filling that slot.) The orchestra performed as planned, even though some sections of the city were still in cleanup mode, as I observed on Saturday in the Peachtree Battle area, particularly around Bohler Road and Woodward Way; Moores Mill Road was impassable at one point. But diving from the east side of Atlanta to Symphony Hall, I did not encounter severe problems on Friday night.
The late ASO bassist Michael Kenady (detail from official ASO photo).
At the event’s start, members of the ASO’s contrabass section presented a heartfelt pre-concert tribute to contrabassist Michael Kenady, who passed away this past June. Until his death, Kenady held the distinction of being the longest-serving current musician in the ASO, playing contrabass with the orchestra for 59 years under all five music directors.
Flowers honoring Kenady were set onstage on a chair representing “the best seat in the house.”
The concert began with a dozen selections from Gustav Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (“The boy’s magic horn: old German songs”), a collection of German folk poems set to music, reflecting both the charm and darkness inherent in the texts. The work showcases Mahler’s ability to blend orchestral colors with vivid vocal storytelling.
In this particular music of Mahler’s, Nathalie Stutzmann was in her element; here, her conducting craft was informed by insights drawn from her vocal craft as a singer—a much different situation than Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (“Titan”) of the previous week. Although roughly the same length, the “Titan” Symphony is a greatly expanded traditional symphonic structure, with the expectation of shaping its long dramatic spans convincingly. By contrast, poetic narrative dictates the structure of songs in Des Knaben Wunderhorn on a smaller scale, so the kind of moment-to-moment conducting we have so often seen from Stutzmann is much more successful here.
Fleur Barron’s glowing mezzo-soprano voice brought to her portions of the cycle a quality that explains well her growing reputation within Mahler’s oeuvre, including her capacity to handle the nuanced emotional and technical demands of his music. Meanwhile, the much taller baritone Samuel Hasselhorn impressed less with the size of his voice than with diction and ability to phrase even the most declamatory passage, as well as his ability to convey character.
Although it felt long (especially as, at over 50 minutes, it was the entire first half of the concert) it was a lovely rendition.
After intermission, good fortune stayed with Stutzmann in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6, a work that diverges from traditional symphonic structure. Instead of the typical four-movement format, Shostakovich’s Sixth Symhony opens with a lengthy, introspective “Largo,” which was the high point of the evening, effectively conveying the movement’s bleakness and emotional weight, with Stutzmann effectively shaping the long, sustained lines that make this movement so powerful. I was struck how good the ASO sounded.
The subsequent fast-paced “Scherzo” and “Presto” movements gave the orchestra a chance to showcase its technical brilliance. The “Scherzo” crackled with irony, its playful rhythms delivered with sharp precision by the ASO. In the “Presto,” the orchestra’s fast-paced energy was palpable, with the strings frenetically racing through Shostakovich’s sardonic finale. One part of the success of those two movements was that Stutzmann, despite her addiction to bombast, did not overdo it on this occasion.
This earned from the audience a sincere ovation that was both deserved and (thankfully) less of the whoops and hollers of a high school pep rally that kicks in on those occasions the music goes over the top—loudness for its own sake. We can be hopeful this particular concert is a good omen for the future. Fingers crossed. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- Nathalie Stutzmann: nathaliestutzmann.com
- Fleur Barron: fleurbarron.com
- Samuel Hasselhorn: samuelhasselhorn.com
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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