Woeful brass mars Luisi's return visit

A return visit from maestro Fabio Luisi was a much-awaited event at the MPO on 7 Nov 2015. On a previous showing with the MPO, he drilled the often-maligned MPO musicians into a superhuman showing in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

On this visit, he offered just one piece – Mahler’s Seventh Symphony in E minor, which is about 80 minutes long. This time, even he was unable to work miracles with the MPO, which had quite a lot of substitute woodwind and brass players as usual.

Luisi tried to characterize Mahler’s musical intentions vividly. A guest leader (Marie Rossano) led the orchestra on the night. The MPO strings were indeed quite vivid in their characterization, as were the woodwinds.

The very obvious let down for the night were horns and the massed brass instruments, which were frequently woefully out of tune, had masses of cracked notes and were poor in ensemble playing.

This persistently poor brass playing in the first movement spilled over into the second movement. The opening horn solo has the notes (G, C, E, G, C, A flat and G) in the score but the principal horn player for the night played (G, C, E, G, B, A flat and G) instead, fluffing a very simple 2nd inversion C major arpeggio. One does wonder if the horn players employed at the MPO are truly professional.

Musically, the third and fourth movements improved with some better playing. Particularly, the fourth movement was quite well played with some lovely portamento playing from guest leader Rossano.

The poor brass playing reared its ugly head again in the fifth and final triumphant movement. The rowdy brass players in the previous concert I attended (of the Sibelius Violin Concerto where they played havoc with balances and obliterated the cutting edge of a 1707 Golden Period Stradivarius violin) were suddenly very shy and lacked sufficient power in Mahler’s final peroration of (G, E, D and C).