Carlos Kalmar is a conductor this reviewer has never heard of. Born 1958 in Uruguay to Austrian parents, he studied with Karl Österreicher at the College for Music in Vienna and in June 1984 won First Prize at the Hans Swarowsky Conducting Competition in Vienna. I searched a bit on rec.music.classical about him and found several good comments about him as well as some not so favourable. Certainly he seems to have made a reputation for himself early on. For some reason, however, he doesn't seem to have shot to fame as quickly as some of the other rising stars. I wonder why.

It is hard to put Kalmar's conducting into any classification - he has ideas, certainly, whether they work or not, and they are interesting, though sometimes rather bizarre. His performance of Brahms' Third Symphony is a case in point: he took an incredibly sluggish tempo for the first movement, and indeed most of the symphony, picking up only in the second half of the last movement. I have heard only three conductors who have been able to get away with that choice of tempo. One was Furtwängler, another was Klemperer, and the last is Barbirolli. All were at least slightly faster than Kalmar, and all were conducting orchestras that were a great deal more familiar with this rarely-played music than the SSO.

I probably would not be far off the mark if I estimated it as being at about 80 or 90 crotchets to the minute for the first movement. Honestly it was hard to listen to. If there ever was a symphony whose first movement said "Fly with me" it would be Brahms' Third Symphony - those soaring violin lines, reaching higher and higher, those two opening chords pregnant with anticipation and event. All but negated, I'm afraid, by Kalmar's tempi. Was it a simply a perverse choice, or merely a way of tackling Brahms' structural difficulties? In the end, I was not convinced. Kalmar's choice of tempo did not illuminate any aspect of the music more effectively, and the orchestra did not seem to take well to it. It appeared that they just had not had enough time to get accustomed to the conductor. To my mind, the third symphony is not large-scale like the first and the fourth. Trying to monumentalize it does nothing for the music. The rest of the movements were conducted at tempi somewhat similar to that of the first, all played in a rather lush, Romantic style that seemed rather at odds with the sparsest of Brahms' symphonies.

Kalmar's unwillingness to change tempo and his stiffness of transitions so apparent in the Brahms symphony posed similar problems for the works before the interval. Once again, his tempi in the Haydn tended towards the slow. The orchestra was reduced, which lead me to anticipate a HIP, but the interpretation was all-in-all rather Romantic, with hairpins and big coda ritardandi, et al. The first movement was the most successful of all, followed by the third, though in the third, more attention could have been given to the solo instrumental parts, which were mostly played well, but without that last bit of playfulness. Also the bassoonist seemed to have trouble and his counterpart on the bass seemed a tad restrained. Not Haydn's intentions, certainly - he had a good band of talented musicians to play his music, and he was always stretching their limits. In the second movement I wish more contrast would have been given between the two Allegro sections and the Adagio section they frame. The last movement suffered from some insecure intonation from the horns, and generally lacked bounce and vigour. All in all it was a credible performance, though, and not wayward in the least like the Brahms.

The French-Canadian soloist, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties, yet she was billed as a "young performer" in this concert. Perhaps this reflects more the degree of maturity of her singing career than her chronological age. Lemieux's stage presence is undeniable, but her expression and communication in this concert were hampered by her reliance on the score. The presence of the music stand, however necessary it might have been for her, was a definite impediment to my enjoyment of her performance, which was pretty middle-of-the-road as performances go, without many moments of inspiration or many new things to say. Her soft notes were done well, but she lacked a certain tension. She also has a rather irritating vocal technique problem, in that her voice took time to escape her mouth, so that her attacks were very "soft" and "round." I found myself wishing she would start a phrase at the volume at which she wanted to achieve, instead of "easing" into the music. Her voice, to start with, is a rather small one, and this "easing" into the music meant that often she could not be heard until midway through the first word of each phrase.

It would be too tedious to go through Lemieux's interpretation of each Lied in detail, so I will only mention a few interpretative points. I found her command of the lyrics a little wanting, not using the words to their full potential, and many of the climaxes of the pieces were shunned rather than really worked up to, although her German is impeccable. A case in point: in the fourth song "Oft denk' ich", "Sonnenschein" or "sunshine" is the emotional climax of the song, and this was not brought off effectively.

The emotional pitch of Lemieux's singing was rather cool overall until the last song, which was overall an acceptable way of building up the cycle. I would say that her interpretation is still a work in progress, so to speak, and I expect that it will improve with time. She certainly has the potential for great interpretation of this kind of music.

In the Kindertotenlieder, Kalmar's conducting, though attentive to details, was rather short on attentiveness to Lemieux, and more than a little stiff as well. It would have been good if he had balanced the orchestra a little more and done something with the horns, which were constantly on their worst behaviour, the obligatto parts in particular being botched worse than my wildest imagination.

In short, the programming could have been improved for this concert, and the performances themselves were rather uneven, and often somewhat lacking in insight.

Derek Lim will probably take a month to listen to all his Mahler music back to back without stopping.

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