H. L. Mencken once called the South the “The Sahara of the Bozart” (punning on the French beaux-arts), lamenting the decline and fall of that region from a great civilization to a “gargantuan paradise” with “not . . . a single orchestra capable of playing a Beethoven symphony.” That was in 1917. While the decades that followed this critique saw a cultural vindication of the South as the home of epoch-defining writers and indeed as the nursery of many of the dominant genres of popular music today, the South has remained something of a desert for classical music.
New Orleans, however, once proved an exception. Buoyed by the city’s Spanish and French cultural heritage, New Orleans’s primary opera company was one of the country’s major outfits from at least 1819 until the destruction of its home, the French Opera House, by fire in 1919. It hosted the American premieres of many French operas and toured the Northeast with that repertoire throughout the antebellum period. New Orleans even produced the Romantic composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1826–69), a child prodigy sent to the Paris Conservatory for his musical education.
Throughout the twentieth century, the state of opera and classical music in the Crescent City was less than hopeful. A succession of orchestras tried and failed to keep their footing in the city from at least the 1930s. It was not until 1991, when the board of the New Orleans Philharmonic Symphony voted to dissolve its organization—at which time Maxim Shostakovich was its music director—that the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) came into being. Over the past three decades, despite all obstacles, the LPO has changed the doomed narrative of orchestral music in New Orleans. The LPO is the only full-time professional orchestra in the region and the only musician-owned and -governed professional orchestra in the country. In 2018, the composer Philip Glass chose the orchestra to perform some of his works at Carnegie Hall, something that would have been unthinkable a few decades prior. The LPO currently plays under the baton of Matthew Kraemer. While the orchestra does not have its own hall, it is a regular tenant of the Orpheum Theater, originally built in 1918 as a vaudeville venue with exacting acoustics and exquisite Beaux-Arts decor.
On the evening of April 17, I had the pleasure of hearing the LPO perform Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the married soloists James and Olga Perez Flora.
The Eighth, Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” opens with a lyrical allegro moderato, its first theme introduced, pianissimo, by the cellos and basses, growling down to the C below the bass clef before handing things over to the violins’ flurry of sixteenth notes in the ninth measure. This opening movement is one that frequently makes me reflect on how differently conductors can interpret tempo, some taking the allegro moderato slowly and some so gingerly that one must wonder whether or not the conductor’s score has the word “moderato” at the heading or not. Kraemer’s approach fell somewhere in the middle, neither too spirited nor too laggardly. His musicians were cohesive in their playing, and the room melded the sections together in surprising ways: brass and percussion did not have the sonic feel of being ten feet behind the strings; at the same time, every note could be heard precisely from each instrument thanks to the evenhandedness of the space. Such a room demands perfection from its players.
Yet the dynamic gap between pianissimo and fortissimo seemed thin in this first movement, and the sforzandos felt less prominent than they should have. At first I thought this an issue of the lively sound of the hall, but the problem seemed to resolve in the second movement, when there was notable contrast between the clarinet’s pianissimo solo near the beginning of the movement and the two fortissimo brass passages towards the middle.
An uneven second half of the program was dedicated to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, a symphonic work disguised as a song cycle and called “A Symphony for Tenor, Alto (or Baritone) Voice, and Orchestra,” rather than numbered—thanks to its composer’s fear of the “curse of the ninth,” a superstition based on the fact that no composer since Beethoven had lived to compose a symphony beyond his ninth. The texts are taken from the poet Hans Bethge’s free-verse reimaginings of both French and German translations of classical Chinese poetry. Each poem reflects the composer’s anxiety about mortality, from the refrain of the cycle’s opening drinking song, “Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod!” (Dark is life, is death!), to the closing “Der Abschied” (The farewell).
The tenor soloist, James Flora, possesses a pleasant voice, never nasally, piercing, or fussy. Though he was sometimes not as strong as I would have liked, his vocal power did come through at important moments, such as in the final stanzas of the opening drinking song: “Du aber, Mensch, wie lang lebst denn du?” (But you, Man, how long shall you live?).
I’ve previously written about my distaste for wide vibrato, a temptation for mezzo-sopranos when approaching higher notes in their range, but a temptation that Olga Perez Flora largely avoided here. She has a strong voice, though I found that she was the most articulate in her lower register.
The small stage at the Orpheum would seem a claustrophobic fit for Mahler’s large-scale instrumentation, which includes two harps, a celesta, a mandolin, and two soloists. Yet again, the room accommodated the sound, and the percussion was notably clean and crisp. I was particularly impressed by the musicianship of the lower string sections and the woodwinds, and the harps were surprisingly audible and rich. Kraemer and his players again worked together seamlessly to produce a luscious sound that made this work feel like a symphony with song rather than a series of large recital pieces. The evening was a marked success for Kraemer and the Louisiana Philharmonic.
