'Technicolor Armageddon' at the Seattle Symphony

In a new marketing strategy for the Seattle Symphony, this weekend's concerts are doing double duty. Along with marking the traditional finale to the season's subscription series, they're serving as opener for the just-launched SummerFest initiative, which is intended to capture new audiences.

As has become the custom for their season-ender programs, music director Gerard Schwarz and the SSO have pulled out all the stops to present a sonic extravaganza. Often this has meant a Mahler symphony, but in this case we get a twofer, with a programmatically smart coupling of Wagner and Mahler. Indeed, given the expansive orchestral forces Mahler calls for in his Sixth Symphony — augmenting the SSO are 13 extra players — it seems only Benaroya Hall's Watjen concert organ is being left unused. Thursday night's performance included moments of first-class playing from the SSO as well as frustrating reminders of the ensemble's untapped potential.

Part of the evening's draw for a very enthusiastic crowd was soprano Jane Eaglen's appearance to sing Isolde's final vision in the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. This famous concert extract offers Wagner's tone-poem-size condensation of his opera simply by linking its opening and closing sections; it also happens to be one of the formats in which the public first heard this epoch-making music, before the opera itself was premiered in 1865.

The orchestra gave an impressive reading, including noticeably tight string ensemble, to wring maximal emotion from Wagner's dense harmonies and splendidly gleaming timbral balances. Schwarz unforcedly shaped the Prelude toward its inexorable, bleak climax, yet — as if unintentionally foreshadowing some of the drawbacks of the Mahler to come — he let whole sections pass along the way with virtually no profile (the restlessly circular phrases echoed between strings and winds, for example).

But the real disappointment here was Eaglen's can belto "Love Death." As someone who has been captivated by some of her most memorable performances, I'm well aware of the glory of which Eaglen's steel-reinforced soprano is capable. Nearly a decade after her triumphant debut as Isolde at Seattle Opera, however, Eaglen delivered a sluggish succession of undifferentiated and graceless phrasings, with an unpleasantly harsh edge to her top notes. Her formidable volume through most of her range makes for an oddly unsettling contrast with the timid, scarcely audible lower end of her voice. As far as the dramatic context goes, Eaglen's unrelievedly monumental sound suggested little of Isolde's radiant leave-taking from the material world.

Mahler's symphonies make for great end-of-season programming in part because they showcase the full spectrum of an orchestra. At the same time, they also test a conductor's technical and interpretive mettle to the utmost. That particularly goes for the Sixth. It lacks an extramusical program to help sell it (aside from the unofficial moniker "Tragic" and loose, after-the-fact associations between Mahler's personal life and the fatal "hammerblows" of its finale). What's more, the Sixth ends by shutting off all escape from the nightmarish, pitiless world it graphically explores in a wide-spanning — though classically oriented — structure.

Mahler himself, according to his widow Alma, was so overwrought by what he had created that he nearly sabotaged the music with a poor performance when he conducted the premiere in 1906. Part of the aura around the San Francisco Symphony's Grammy-winning account of the work under Michael Tilson Thomas comes from the fact that it was recorded from live performances beginning on September 12, 2001.

Schwarz launched the affair with an overpowering, dread-filled urgency that revealed the close cousinage of Shostakovich's cruel forced marches. And typical Schwarz strengths were in full evidence — in the way he italicized structural signposts and paced climaxes; in the driven, tightly sprung rhythms; and in the brassy brightness of the score's most exuberant moments.

But unlike the Tristan music, a roughshod and sloppy inattention to balances often proved distracting. The oversize brass section sometimes threatened to swallow the rest of the orchestra. Key details of texture, such as the swirling string figures which collapse around the first theme, swept incoherently by. Most egregious was the episode scored for offstage cowbells. What's supposed to suggest an indescribably ethereal moment — Mahler likened it to "the last greeting from earth to penetrate the remote solitude of the mountain peaks" — sounded like a clumsy encounter with the kitchen's Calphalon during a power outage. These details are no small matter: Mahler's masterful orchestration is never merely decorative but rather integral to his musical argument.

The order of the two inner movements remains a matter of heated debate for Mahlerphiles, since the composer himself changed his mind after first conceiving of the Scherzo as the second movement (I tend to find the case for Scherzo-then-Andante, as on Bernstein's recordings, more compelling since it intensifies the ghastliness of the Scherzo). Schwarz has chosen to follow the currently approved practice of the International Mahler Society, which is Andante followed by Scherzo (although, curiously, he ignores Mahler's revision of the hammer strokes in the finale to two and includes all three, as scored in the first edition).