MSO, de Waart, and Brahms for the Ages

The immediate and electric tension in the heartbeat timpani, forceful strings and glowering brass and winds signaled from the start that conductor Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony meant business in Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C-minor Friday. Brahms opened by spinning not a castle in the air, but a dark fortress. The orchestra made us feel the mass of it and the implacability of its presence in its relentless tread and resonant chords laden with heavy basses.

Brahms’ dark introduction moved on to an episode of pizzicato “waiting music,” a la Beethoven. Not much happened, but de Waart and company maintained a charged suspense. From the grey stone of this music emerged a most unlikely and exquisite flowering vine of melody, twining from Katherine Young Steele’s oboe seamlessly into the cellos. That transitional strand carried us to the gallant, galloping principal theme, and all that opening mass turned into juggernaut momentum.

I can describe all this so vividly only because de Waart and his musicians played it so vividly and with such total investment and awareness. No one on that stage was about to let one bar of the Symphony No. 1 or, a little later, of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E-minor, pass routinely.

The second movement began as a proper hymn but soon wandered into a dreamy meander, as if one turned away from a sermon to become lost in the sunny springtime beyond the chapel windows. The meander congealed into an ardent, coherent melody, a solid thought emerging from aimless reverie, like some Impressionist garden suddenly coming into hyper-realistic focus. The culmination of this episode came on the wings of Frank Almond’s violin, as it soared a couple of octaves above and in perfect unison with the horns.

Where composers from the previous generation would have placed a minuet or scherzo, Brahms stays in 2/4 and sonata form. But his third movement is simpler in its sentiments than the rest of the symphony. Its main theme might not be a dance, but it’s a least a stroll in the countryside, a  notion that the hunting-call second theme reinforces. De Waart was so specific with the dynamics that we could hear the hunting party draw near and grow distant by turns.

The sense of foreboding Brahms established at the outset returns in the finale, but redemption is coming. A hint of the hymn tune from the second movement leads to a glorious dawn chorale in the brasses and a thrilling coda.

I do not mean to suggest, with the fanciful imagery above, that Brahms had any narrative or particular picture in mind for this music. Even though Brahms was an abstract composer and countered contemporary trends toward program music, his symphonies do have dramatic and narrative aspects. I write of dawn and dark fortresses metaphorically, by way of comparing sounds to things we might see or imagine.

De Waart is a great Brahms conductor beyond technical expertise because of his understanding of the dramatic import of any given moment and of the overall dramatic construction of the music. He can tell the heroic music from the waiting music, the climax from the build-up, the lightly bound and free flowing from the tense and restrained, the buoyant and light from the massive and weighty. He knows how to convey those essences of feeling to his players and they know how to convey them to us. They are engaged throughout and aware of the moment, so they prompt specific feelings and images in us. We can hear the basses, cellos and horns and see the fortress even as we follow the fine points of sonata form with intellectual detachment.

The Fourth is altogether more pastoral and light than the First, and more about taking pleasure in sound and in display of musicianship on the part of the composer and the orchestra.

The Fourth is more beautiful, in the most conventional sense of the word, and Friday it revealed the full scope of the beauty of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Take, for example, not only the placid dignity in Todd Levy’s reading of the principal theme of the second movement, but how the massed strings captured exactly that spirit — writ large — when that theme came their way in the recapitulation. And take, for example, the utter security and gorgeous blend of the horn section, solos of great character and assurance from Levy, Steele and flutist Sonora Slocum, the firm presence of the low strings, and the astonishing substance and fine intonation of the violins in the highest registers.

Brahms made the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra sound profoundly great, and vice versa.

This program, opened at a matinee on Friday at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, will be repeated there at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:3o p.m. Sunday, May 25-26. For tickets, call the Marcus Center box office, 414 273-7206.