This morning I asked Kathleen van Bergen, who functions as overseer of many artistic decisions here at the SLSO, what is the instrument Tim Myers plays that opens the Mahler Seven. I had mistakenly said last week that Jennifer Montone plays the opening theme on the French horn – then at the Saturday night concert I heard and saw Myers creating, on a peculiar brass instrument, the soft, full, thick, velvety sound that enriched the hall.
“That’s the euphonium,” van Bergen told me. “And Tim is one of the best euphonium players in the world.”
So I phone the Principal Trombone of the SLSO and ask about the euphonium. “Think of it as a half-size tuba,” Myers says. “The origins of the intrument are murky.” The euphonium is primarily a band instrument, he explains, in American concert bands as well as in British brass bands. Mahler actually calls for a tenor horn in the Seven, “which has a fairly narrower bore and a lighter sound,” than the euphonium, Myers adds.
Whatever Mahler was thinking, Myers' euphonium introduced a texture of sound that immediately drew you deeply into the composition. This concert will go down as one of my all-time favorites at Powell. There were a couple of times my wife and I just turned to each other with expressions of amazement. At one time early on, she took her glasses off because she had become so mesmerized by the action of the double basses, “like watching riders on horses,” that she was losing a sense of the whole.
One of the pleasures of attending a concert at Powell is not just the sound quality – and the Mahler was ringing pleasantly in our heads long after we left the building – but the visual drama: Alan Gilbert eyeing the musicians motionlessly for many seconds before beginning the second movement; the interplay of instruments within sections, for instance as the three trumpets seemed in dialogue at times; and the ecstatic playing of Kathleen Mattis on viola.
