Santa Rosa Symphony soars through epic Mahler piece

The Santa Rosa Symphony closed its 87th season Saturday under Music Director Bruno Ferrandis with the first of three performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, delivering a confident reading that soared through the span of the 90-minute work without ever looking back.

The concert in the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall marked the first time Ferrandis has conducted a full, Mahler symphony with the orchestra, a longtime dream that had been deferred by the lagging economy. (The army of musicians onstage for this work numbered nearly 170, including orchestra, mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer and two choirs.)

Ferrandis studied at Juilliard with Mahler’s greatest champion, Leonard Bernstein, and conducted the sprawling and unorthodox work with sensitive restraint, allowing the angst-ridden music to speak for itself.

The orchestra in turn provided the sharp dynamic contrasts, plucky rhythms and seamless transitions that knit together the complicated collage of Mahler’s unique soundscape: military and funeral music, pastoral and Jewish music, all within the classic symphonic shape.

Like Beethoven, Mahler was an outsider - a conductor who composed in his spare time, a Jew who converted to Christianity, a deeply spiritual and idealistic man living in a jaded and decaying society. He was misunderstood by his contemporaries at the turn of the century, but he knew his time would come.

After 75 years of global holocausts spanning the ovens of Auschwitz and the jungles of Vietnam, Bernstein revived Mahler’s music in the 1960s out of appreciation for its unvarnished and prescient truths.

“Only after all of this can we finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that it foretold all,” Bernstein wrote in 1981. “And in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.”

For the Mahler lovers out there, sitting through a 90-minute symphony without an intermission - except for a seventh-inning stretch after the first movement - was not a big sacrifice. And for the rest, there were lots of lovely, trance-like moments that lured one to the edge of sleep, if not to the doors of heaven itself.

While a few of the orchestra’s principal players were missing, the assembled troops - including nine French horns, two timpanists and two harpists - pulled together as a well-oiled team to deliver the raw, emotional extremes of this physically challenging work.

Originally performed in piecemeal fashion, the Symphony No. 3 had its first complete performance in June 1902 with Mahler at the podium. The first movement, which he composed last, spans about a third of the symphony’s entire length.

It comprises a series of quick, bright marches interrupted by passages of dirge-like foreboding, but it ends with the triumph of light over dark. The cellos and basses were particularly precise with their grumbling entrances and concertmaster Joe Edelberg provided contrast with sweetly singing solos. The brass sections delivered piercing tone and precise intonation, especially in the solo passages.

After applauding at the triumphant close of first movement, the audience stood and stretched while the Santa Rosa Children’s Chorus and the Santa Rosa Symphony Honor Choir Women’s Chorus filed into the loft behind the stage for movements 2 through 6.

The “posthorn” - an offstage trumpet - did not hit every high note perfectly, but was nonetheless effective in evoking the acoustic space of Mahler’s “nature sound,” the primal experience of hearing a far-off bird or church bell. Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony describes this acoustical experience as one of man’s essential needs. “It gives us a sense of perspective on ourselves and our relationship to the earth,” he said in his 1994 book, “Viva Voce.”

Likewise, the rich, marbled voice of mezzo-soprano Fischer struck just the right chord, and the softly sonorous voices of the women’s and children’s choirs - “Bim! Bom! Bim! Bom!” - rang with angelic joy.

The noble tone of the brass and timpani closed the work on a high note, and the audience’s cheers and whistles left no doubt that this grand finale would be remembered as the high point of the orchestra’s first three seasons at the Green Music Center.

With patience and hard work, the musicians under Ferrandis’ baton have grown accustomed to the hall’s sensitive acoustics. If this season is any indication, their future looks bright.

The symphony will repeat the Saturday program at 8 p.m. Monday at the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park. Tickets: $20 to $80. santarosasymphony.com.

You can reach Staff Writer Diane Peterson at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.