Austin Symphony With Christopher O’Riley
Dell Hall at the Long Center for the Performing Arts
May 15
When you reach the end of something, it’s natural to want to reflect on it, and as the Austin Symphony opened the final concert of its 99th season, it seemed to be in a reflective mood.
I’m not sure it was intentional – the reason that Maestro Peter Bay opened the program with Gustav Mahler’s Blumine was because it was originally part of the composer’s first symphony, which was closing the concert – but the music set that tone, projecting a pleasingly drowsy and dreamy quality, like that which you feel on first waking in the morning with the remembrance of a wonderful experience the night before. In the light of day, it seems hazy and slightly unreal, but you linger in the memory and the sensations you can recall. That feeling, applied to ASO, might have had patrons pleasantly contemplating the musical riches of the season just past: the great Leon Fleisher playing Mozart, the symphony’s collaboration with Conspirare on Cary Ratliff’s spectacular Ode to Common Things, cellist Douglas Harvey’s star turn on Don Quixote, the all-Barber program with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and so on – a bounty surely worth reflecting on.
The ruminative ambience continued through Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27. Some of it could be attributed to the music, as when the devil-may-care whimsicality that guest soloist Christopher O’Riley brought to the first movement gave way to an air of regret in the second, as if he was coming to terms with some loss. But though the third movement returned to the frolicsome spirit of the first, something in O’Riley’s playing kept it from feeling less than spontaneous. You could see from the intensity of his expressions that he was deeply engaged in the work, but the sound coming from the Steinway suggested someone who hasn’t known joy in a long while trying to recall how to be playful, someone working to reconstruct a feeling across a distance of time.
But then something broke open. When O’Riley came out for his bow, he and Bay were talking excitedly, and then the pianist announced that he would like to play a piece by Radiohead. Though O’Riley is well-known for the two albums in which he adapted the band’s music for solo piano, this was not on the program and reportedly not something he had done on his first night with ASO. As he played his arrangements of “Gagging Order” and “You,” colors and passions not seen in the Mozart erupted from the piano. Their roiling, thunderous force ripped us out of the past and hurled us into the present, no longer in our heads but in our bodies, experiencing sensations in the moment.
And that urgency held true in the full Mahler. The long opening note sustained by the strings was a taut wire that underscored the sound with tension and snared us. And we were kept in its grip, long and sprawling as the symphony was, by the orchestra’s energy and Bay’s fervor on the podium. He conducted the airier sections with his characteristically light touch, but when the score turned dark, his body tightened, his gestures sharpened, and he kept calling for more, more, more from his musicians. The result was a robust and muscular sound that crescendoed to a cathartic explosion. It’s no wonder that, when it was finished, Bay had to wipe his brow with a handkerchief. He had worked it.
Which left this ASO audience at the season’s end not thoughtfully casting a look back at what was but, electrified by the visceral sensations of the here and now, eagerly looking ahead to the Austin Symphony’s centenary season.
This article appears in May 21 • 2010.