Concert review: Exuberant, haunting Mahler will go on road

The appetizer for this week's Osmo Vänskä-led Minnesota Orchestra program, to be heard Sunday at New York's Lincoln Center, is "The Dryad," a four-minute morsel by Jean Sibelius that feels more like a fragment than a finished work. (A dryad is a wood nymph, but the music seems more a sketch of the nymph's habitat -- one envisions a dark northern forest -- than of the nymph herself.) Melancholic and atmospheric, the piece stops short of closure.

No such complaints about Robert Schumann's beautifully designed Piano Concerto (1845), one of the most captivating works in its genre, combining sinew and refinement, impetuosity and wistfulness. Pianist Lars Vogt is fast out of the gate in the turbulent opening bars but proves equally sympathetic to Schumann's relaxed lyricism. Vogt is particularly striking in the transition to the final movement, in which he seems a bit more free-wheeling than he does earlier. The orchestra, lively and transparent, is careful not to overwhelm him.

To devotees of the later Mahler, his First Symphony (1883-88) can sound naïve, repetitive, occasionally strident. (Even Mahler's wife, Alma, admitted to disliking it.) The problem isn't just compositional: embedded in the piece is a heroic ideal that was already anachronistic when Mahler wrote. But the symphony offers abundant compensations: the exuberant nature music of the first movement (a paean to spring, much needed in these parts); the delicious grotesquerie of the "Frère Jacques" movement; the dreamlike music of reminiscence in the finale, so haunting you want it never to end.

Vänskä and colleagues play the First as if it were Mahler's masterpiece. The jubilation feels genuine. The horns, all eight of them, sound especially grand, but every choir of the orchestra distinguishes itself.

The conductor makes two questionable choices. He gives the opening solo in the "Frère Jacques" movement to the whole bass section, rather than a single player. And he includes the movement called "Blumine" (Flower Piece), which Mahler dropped from later versions of the symphony. (To my ear, "Blumine" is high-end salon music -- though I've never heard it so fetchingly done as it was Thursday.)

Before the hushed beginning of the symphony, Vänskä, index finger to lips, implored the audience for a silence that never quite came. May his luck improve in New York!

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.