Review: Nathalie Stutzmann, ASO are hit and miss with holiday program

Weird times at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Nathalie Stutzmann returned to her Symphony Hall podium Thursday for a light-classics holiday program, her third appearance in her debut season as music director. Like her two earlier visits, this one held moments of compelling insight and charm but was, by the ASO’s high standards, a mess.

Stutzmann is relatively new to conducting, in a field that rewards decades of experience.  Many of us continue to hope that the star contralto-turned-conductor, an artist with an imaginative personality and a fresh perspective, will develop into a substantive and unconventional musical thinker. By creativity and force of character, she could help reframe the symphony orchestra experience. At the very least, we’d expect satisfying concerts.

Thursday’s concert clocked in at about 55 minutes of music — a very short evening, where a typical subscription concert runs up to about 80 minutes. 

Two tall Christmas trees trimmed in silver and white, and a large wreath at the back of the stage, set the holiday scene. Stutzmann opened with the Prelude to Act 1 of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, supremely rousing music that was cleanly and briskly dispatched. The hummable tunes and clever orchestrations in that famous opera overture, turns out, were echoed across the rest of the program.

Bizet’s charming, youthful Symphony in C, written about 20 years before Carmen, is classical in spirit — think Haydn and Mozart — but already mature in its compositional technique, already hinting at the Bizet we love. In the second movement, Stutzmann highlighted the Spanish-arabesque atmosphere, with lovely solos from oboist Zachary Boeding and backed by guitar-like plunks from the strings, as if it were a prequel to the sultry heat of Carmen. The symphony’s scurrying finale, too, often seemed like a perky version of the opera’s foreboding gestures. When Stutzmann knows where she’s going, she can go deeper into a familiar piece of music than expected. But it’s hit and miss.

After intermission, they played Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 1 from The Nutcracker, Op. 71a, the composer’s own collection of dances from Act 2 of the ballet, starting with the “Ouverture miniature” and finishing with “Waltz of the Flowers.” Stutzmann started them out of balance, perhaps under-rehearsed. With the percussion coming on too strong, much of the overture sounded like a Concerto for Triangle and Orchestra.   

But they pulled it together for parts of the Nutcracker suite. The “March” and, later, the Russian “Trepak” dance were hefty and full of verve. The “Arabian” dance, what was once termed exotic and “Oriental,” was yet another sonic link to the parched heat of Carmen. 

For the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” one of many brilliant soundscapes that appeared out of the composer’s extraordinary imagination, Peter Marshall’s tinkly keyboard celesta and Alcides Rodriguez’s velvety bass clarinet covered the very top and very bottom on the orchestra’s sonic range. There’s nothing more cliched than “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” but somehow Stutzmann’s pacing and the musicians’ long rapport with each other made it sparkle. We heard it anew.  

The program repeats Saturday and Sunday, both concerts at 3 p.m., but with an asterisk attached.

The ASO’s talented assistant conductor, Jerry Hou, will lead Sunday’s concert. Why? Turns out that Stutzmann had been inadvertently double-booked, with concerts in Finland next week. So she leads two of these Bizet-Nutcracker performances and the assistant steps in for the third.

Hou will undoubtedly benefit from leading the third performance, but Stutzmann’s absence is not a good look for Atlanta’s top donors and the ticket-buying public.

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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.