INTIMACY AND ENORMITY:
MOZART AND MAHLER IN COSTA MESA

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, is a peculiar piece to a classical program. It omits oboes entirely, replacing them with clarinets for a softer, more inward blend, and there are no trumpets or drums at all, no means of making a large noise. The work is chamber music that has somehow found itself on a concert stage. Its slow movement, the only piece Mozart wrote in F-sharp minor, a key he otherwise left untouched, opens with the piano alone, a Sicilian-inflected melody that turns inward almost immediately, and the orchestra’s arrival afterward feels less like accompaniment than attendance. The concerto exposes pianists who would rather be somewhere else. Its mechanisms are transparent, there is no orchestral weight to shelter behind, and no passage is so technically demanding that mere execution excuses interpretation. It requires something harder: the willingness to mean it, quietly, without fuss.

Yoav Levanon

Yoav Levanon, who opened Friday’s Pacific Symphony program at the Segerstrom Concert Hall, meant it. The Israeli pianist, now 21, has been accumulating notices since he performed Chopin at eleven, Rachmaninoff with the Israel Philharmonic at thirteen, and a solo recital at Verbier that Le Temps described as possessed of a magical touch. All three were audible on Friday. His technique no longer draws attention to itself, which is exactly what this music requires: scales spun without perceptible effort, inner voices shaped with precision, the left hand supplying harmonic grounding that never competes with the melodic line above. The first movement’s double exposition unfolded with enough phrase clarity that the architecture announced itself without needing to be explained. When the development section moved through its sequence of minor-key anxieties, Levanon tracked the emotional weather carefully, his touch lightening and darkening with the harmony.

The slow movement was the evening’s finest achievement. Where another kind of virtuoso might push the Adagio’s opening theme toward a more extravagant melancholy, or engineer the middle section’s shift to A major as a calculated release, Levanon simply played. His tone in this movement was hard to name, not warm exactly, not cool, but held at a temperature that felt calibrated for the room rather than the hall. The wide melodic leaps of the opening theme, which can sound effortful in less assured hands, arrived here as natural speech. The interlude in A major, where flute and clarinet announce a fragment that Mozart would later transpose almost directly into Don Giovanni, had the quality of old friends picking up a conversation.

Yoav Levanon

Mitsuko Uchida’s 2009 recording of K. 488 with the Cleveland Orchestra, which she directed from the keyboard, the piano turned to face the orchestra, kept coming back to mind. Uchida’s Adagio is contemplative to the point of stillness, the textures almost austerely clean, the piano penetrating the music’s grief with what one reviewer rightly called an eloquent directness. It is the playing of someone who has lived with this score for decades, who has stripped away everything that might come between listener and note. There is a fastidiousness to it, an almost possessive care, that can feel less like interpretation than custody. What Levanon offered on Friday was something that recording cannot replicate: the sense of encounter rather than return. Where Uchida’s Adagio arrives at its quiet devastation through accumulated knowledge, Levanon’s felt discovered in real time, the wide melodic leaps landing with a freshness that suggested he was still surprised by them. The woodwinds seemed to be listening rather than waiting their turn. One occasionally wished for more of Uchida’s structural bedrock in the outer movements, particularly the finale, where the rondo felt slightly pushed, trusting the wit of the themes more than their timing. These are the imperfections of a musician still in active negotiation with the score, and they carry their own interest. What Uchida gives the A-major Concerto is the gravity of long habitation. What Levanon gave it Friday was the more fragile gift of discovery.

Eduardo Strausser accompanied with taste and a light hand, the Pacific Symphony woodwinds rising to the collaboration with a responsiveness that this concerto specifically demands and does not always receive.

After intermission, Strausser returned to conduct Mahler’s First Symphony, and the performance left me thinking about finales, and what they cost, and whether the preceding movements had paid enough in advance.

Eduardo Strausser

The First Symphony has always struck many listeners as a young man’s piece, and not only because Mahler was twenty-seven when he sketched the bulk of it in Leipzig. The finale is where everything that came before is either redeemed or exposed, and the work burns brightest there. Mahler described his pace of composition that year as overpowering, like a mountain river he could barely contain, and the miracle of the symphony is that it sounds, at its best, exactly like that. The implicit question Strausser posed on Friday, through dozens of interpretive choices large and small, was whether the finale’s D-major triumph could be made to feel earned rather than declared.

The answer varied. There were passages of real distinction, particularly in the first movement, where Strausser drew the Pacific Symphony’s strings into a kind of suspended stillness, the seven-note sustained A of the opening materialized from near silence. The woodwinds threaded their cuckoo calls into the texture with a suppleness that recalled the writing’s debts to Schubert and to the German countryside Mahler was simultaneously inhabiting and mythologizing. The movement’s gradual brightening felt genuinely cumulative. You sensed a conductor who had thought carefully about pacing, who understood that the movement’s architecture depends on arriving at the first great brass peroration as if at a destination rather than a waypoint.

The second movement, the Ländler, was less convincing. Strausser took it at a tempo brisk enough to foreground its rhythmic crudeness, the stomping, peasant-dance quality Mahler deliberately exaggerated, but without quite summoning the earthy joy that crudeness can generate when a conductor leans into it fully. The result had neither the wistfulness a slower tempo might have unlocked nor the abandon that would have justified the pace chosen. The Pacific Symphony’s brass section had a sharp evening throughout, and the trio’s waltz, with its slightly aristocratic lilt, suggested a conductor capable of fine-grained contrast when the music invited it.

Conductor Eduardo Strausser with Pacific Symphony

The third movement, the funeral march built on a minor-key perversion of Frère Jacques, is where Mahler’s satirical instinct sharpens into something darker and harder to name. Strausser paced it with proper solemnity. The double basses, intoning the theme alone at the movement’s opening, produced a sound both lugubrious and oddly comic, as Mahler intended. The interpolated klezmer episode arrived with appropriate sharpness. But there was something controlled about the movement’s center of gravity, a sense that Strausser was keeping the darkness at a measured distance rather than letting it breathe its full uncanny air. The movement needs to feel, at some level, like a rupture. That feeling came only in flashes.

The finale redeemed much of this. Mahler’s opening salvo, that thunderclap of dissonance from which the movement erupts, landed with real violence, and what followed had a forward pressure that the earlier movements had promised without quite delivering. Strausser seemed to find a new authority here, pressing the music toward a destination that was now actually in sight. The horn choir, rising to the movement’s brass apotheosis, played with an ensemble richness and a clarion brightness that the Segerstrom’s generous acoustic amplified without blurring. When the final D-major chords arrived, they felt, if not fully inevitable, then at least sufficiently prepared, which is, in this symphony, enough.

Strausser is a Brazilian conductor in his mid-thirties, currently music director of Norrlandsoperan in Sweden, and Friday marked his debut with the Pacific Symphony. He has a physical clarity on the podium, economical, precise, untheatrical in the better sense, and the orchestra played with a focus that held across the full evening. What he has not yet fully unlocked, at least in this music, is the willingness to let Mahler’s extremities be genuinely extreme. The First Symphony is built on violent tonal and emotional swings, and it asks the conductor to ride them without tidying them into a single story too soon. When Strausser trusted the music’s lurching discontinuities, the evening came alive. When he organized them, something receded.

Taken together with the Mozart, Friday was a strong evening, and a clarifying one. The reservations about both performances are real, but they are the reservations you form about young musicians still becoming what they will be. That process, on Friday February 26, was the most interesting thing in the room.