Ozawa, Boston Symphony Essays Mahler’s Second Symphony

After close to a quarter-century under the stewardship of Seiji Ozawa, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is not the mighty and deeply accomplished ensemble the conductor took over in 1973. Though its artistic standards remain lofty, the orchestra’s execution has slipped, as witness its last two visits to the Los Angeles area.

Of course the Boston group retains its ability to produce memorable and touching performances, some of which we see regularly on television, via PBS. And it remains among our country’s top 10 symphonic bodies, if no longer in the now-mythical Big Five. It is now an imperfect ensemble, sometimes slipshod about intonation and attacks, regularly unbalanced between choirs and inconsistent mechanically.

Even so, the orchestra, which closed its two-night engagement at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--and its now-concluded eight-city U.S. tour--Friday night by devoting an entire evening to Mahler’s Second Symphony, remains a noble institution.

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With the assistance of the Orange-County-resident Pacific Chorale and soloists Heidi Grant Murphy and Michelle De Young, such nobility--of thought and projection--was present from start to finish. Yet the principal problem became that the arching line and manifest cohesiveness the composer sought between the frightening opening and the inspirational close did not materialize.

Fragmentation of the musical cells which make up the work is the banana-peel that trips up some conductors. Ozawa, a respected and documented Mahlerian, on this occasion failed to convey a sense of wholeness to the work; instead, we heard merely its colorful parts in sequence. The conductor provided intensity and a practiced concentration, yet seldom seemed able to probe the work’s depths.

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Some of the orchestral playing re-created the burnished glories of old, woodwind solos in particular. Even so, the wide contrasts of dynamics one had thought were built in to the superstructure of this piece did not appear. And the exposing acoustics of the Cerritos hall--this time configured for a sold-out audience of 1,600--did not help.

In its very touching portions of the finale, John Alexander’s polished Pacific Chorale achieved a sonority and a spirituality of equal substance. Soloists Murphy and De Young contributed serviceably, though the latter mugged distractingly when not singing.