Jun Märkl sets the stage for next month's Berlioz and Beethoven visions

Reveling in the breadth and depth of his prospects as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's eighth music director, Jun Märkl will step off the Hilbert Circle Theatre prodium for a month after this weekend. Friday night he displayed his acumen for filling out the symphonic spectrum with a program of Mozart and Mahler. 

When he is back to end the Classical Series in June, he will conduct concerts vividly marketable with two visionary masterpieces: Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" and Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor "("Choral"). This weekend, the visionary aspect is concentrated in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G major, which concludes with a folklorically inspired vision of heaven, its text drawn from "The Boy's Magic Horn."

Oh, how alluring apt alliteration's artful aid can be! The ISO touts this weekend by promoting "a program that proceeds from the harem to the heavens." That's a tasteful, accurate description for concerts opening with Mozart''s  Overture to "The Abduction from the Seraglio," passing through his motet "Exsultate, jubilate" and ending with the Mahler work, a symphony so universally charming that the usually Mahler-averse Raymond Leppard once programmed it here.

Speaking of alliteration, long ago Esquire magazine carried a music column by Martin Mayer, which I used to read on my father's subscription every glossy issue. Mayer was a versatile journalist best known for books about such complicated professions and institutions as banking, the Federal Reserve, and the law. About music,  I remember something he wrote (though the context has escaped my memory) that the two composers he considered perfectly suited to his taste — he wouldn't change a note or do without any of them — were Mozart and Mahler. I almost feel the same way, and there they were comfortably sharing the first Classical Series program of (one more time) May. 

Amanda Woodbury proved convincingly Mozartian.

A contemporary cultural note may spring to mind with the choice of this Mozart overture. The opera it introduces, "The Abduction from the Seraglio," could be taken by "woke" ideologues as a glaring example of "othering." It features both anxious and supercilious looks eastward from Europe to the Ottoman Empire, and has a story line in which European virtues are upheld and the values of the alien culture are dispraised.  

At the same time, curiosity about foreigners and their culture has been characteristic of European thought at least since Montaigne. Composers picked up eagerly on aspects of music associated with Janissaries (Turkish military units); Mozart's Janissary forays are described in the program booklet. In the Beethoven symphony ISO patrons will hear next month, a frisky Janissary episode in the finale lends extra sparkle to the "Ode to Joy."  This overture pays tribute with its slightly exotic use of percussion, accompanying the feisty main theme. 

 There's a contrasting lyrical melody representing the survival of threatened love, Western-style. It struck me that the conductor's deft handling ot this episode shows he's capable of getting from the ISO the "classical orchestra" profile that was Leppard's stated goal. Märkl's control was also beneficial in the accompaniment to "Exsultate, jubilate," which was consistently in support of the singer, without overcompensating by fading away into the backdrop.

Amanda Woodbury is the sort of soprano not easy to cover up in this music, however. When she first started, a phrase or two into those Latin words of the title, I thought: "Oh my, are we really going to get a Verdi soprano here?" Not to worry, and her biography confirms that her range is wide and actually hardly focused on Verdi. It's just that her well-projected soprano seemed a little heavy at the outset, the style in danger of overstressing  the text.  

But, thanks to her expressive manner and sense of what the text means right through the climactic "Alleluia," there was nothing out of place in the spinto heft of Woodbury's voice. The aria "Tu virginum corona" had the perfect mood of invitation for the heavens to help celebrate. The audience rapture at the end indicated that classmates from Indiana University and Cincinnati's College Conservatory were in attendance Friday.

I felt she was thoroughly at home in the song that caps the Mahler symphony as its fourth movement. Its unvarnished childlike enthusiasm for the joys of heavenly life benefited from the exuberance of Woodbury's vocal projection. 

In the first three movements, the orchestra exhibited an abundance of its Märkl-elicited attention to detail, including flexibility of tempo. I got the sense that, as Martin Mayer suggested more than six decades ago in Esquire, Mahler put inspiration and freshness in every note. And it behooves every conductor and orchestra who present his symphonies never just to glide along, but to lay out each little miracle like a jewel on velvet.