For Colorado Symphony fans, it was a rewarding two weeks.
Principal guest conductor Douglas Boyd invested wonderfully varied repertoire in back-to-back programs in Boettcher Concert Hall with intelligence, vitality and feeling.
Since the orchestra’s music-director search is being conducted in secret, it is impossible to know the candidates being considered to replace Jeffrey Kahane, who is stepping down at the end of the 2009-10 season.
But if Boyd is interested in the position, he would have to be considered a front-runner, especially after these recent performances.
As he showed last week, the Scottish-born conductor clearly has an affinity for the music of Franz Joseph Haydn.
Friday evening, he brought clarity and insight to the composer’s Symphony No. 6 in D major, “Le Matin,” bringing out the music’s inner dialogue, especially in the slow second movement.
A Haydn symphony might not seem the obvious choice to open a program dominated by Gustav Mahler’s song cycle, “Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth),” but thematically it made sense.
The first piece evoked the rising of the sun, and Mahler’s timeless masterpiece metaphorically deals with its setting — the culminating sixth song beginning with the words, “The sun departs behind the mountains.”
Written after one of Mahler’s daughters died of scarlet fever and he received the grim news that he did not have long to live either, the work confronts the inevitability of death but also embraces the joys of life.
This stirring performance captured the work’s expressiveness and emotional breadth. Boyd and the orchestra brought an all-important sense of immediacy to the music’s swells and sighs, longing and lassitude, calm and command.
The two vocal soloists were first-class. Tenor Stuart Skelton brought the necessary force and gravitas to the first song and displayed the requisite ebullience and agility later on.
But the star of the evening was Jane Irwin, a multi dimensional mezzo-soprano. She could dip into the depths of her handsome, autumnal lower register and then fleetly soar, conveying the music’s ever-changing emotional nuances from the forlorn to the mystical.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
