Another brilliant young guest conductor

This season, the Milwaukee Symphony’s guest roster has been short on big-name soloists but long on superb guest conductors. Except for old friend Gilbert Varga, they haven’t been big names and haven’t helped much at the box office. But Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Olari Elts and now Michael Francis have made smashing MSO debuts in the first months of the season.

Friday night, Francis presided over Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Symphony; Carl Maria von Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1, with the MSO’s own Todd Levy as soloist; and Franck’s Symphony in D minor.

Hindemith based his symphony on his own opera about Mathis Grünewald, painter of the brilliant and horrific Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1515) for an Antonite monastery in Alsace. Hindemith related movements and sections within movements to certain main panels of the triptych and to the sub-panels beneath them. Francis spoke of this in an exceptionally helpful and eloquent way from the podium, complete with orchestral musical examples. He went further, provocatively relating the tumultuous times of the Peasant Revolts of Grünewald’s day to Hindemith’s Germany of 1934, when he composed the present work.

Francis and the orchestra made it stick in a performance of great Expressionist passion contained within Hindemith’s orderly, neo-Classical structures. The thing had the feel of a soul under pressure, especially in the chilling third movement. Hindemith finally rests amid a choir of angels, but the road there isn’t easy. The finale opens with a sort of mass orchestral recitative suggestive of a lurching, desperate effort to find a way out of a dangerous wilderness. Francis’ remarkable combination of clarity and expressive force made for both precise ensemble and emotionally charged playing in this very difficult passage.

Weber’s concerto could be plausibly be rendered as a polite, late Classical workout for the clarinet. But Levy and Francis didn’t play it that way. They made it broadly, extravagantly Romantic, and convincingly so. We know Weber mainly for opera, and Levy played the many lyrical themes in the soaring, well-supported manner of a great singer. It wasn’t just about the pretty sounds of the clarinet; these were emotionally charged arias. Levy even carried that intensity into the flashy arpeggios, scales and ornaments that still take the clarinet to its limits. In this piece and in Levy’s hands, this was not mere show-off music.

The musical materials in Franck’s D-minor Symphony resemble one another closely and repeat a lot across all three movements. I’ve always found it tedious.

Friday, though, Michael Francis had a plan. He took everything to extremes. Very loud louds, very soft lows. Very fast allegros, very slow adagios. Enormous elasticity with phrasing and rhythm. The biggest contrast between statement and echo. The gloomiest gloom, the brightest ecstasy. Much easier to simply beat time and play the thing straight; it takes a very good conductor and a very good orchestra to make such an approach work with limited rehearsal time.

Well, this is a very good conductor and this is a very good orchestra. The music engaged in part because of the relentless energy and focus of the performers and in part because Francis’ approach made Franck’s recycling of the the same old in-bred stuff sound like miraculous reincarnations with new personalities.

In all three cases Friday, Michael Francis knew what he wanted, took a bit of a chance and made a big, positive difference. He changed my mind about Franck’s Symphony in D minor, and for that, I’m grateful.

This program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3, in Marcus Center Uihlein Hall. For tickets, call the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206.

Next week, another young guest conductor, Christoph König, will lead the MSO in concerts at 11:15 a.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9-10. Visit the MSO website or call its ticket line, 414 291-7605.