FROM AROUND THE WORLD: NEW YORK CITY.(Review)

Greater love hath no man than this: mushing to Carnegie Hall through a snowstorm to hear Michael Tilson Thomas lead his San Francisco Symphony, chorus and four soloists, in the seldom-programmed first and last works of Gustav Mahler. The composer never heard his youthful Das Klagende Lied played in its entirety, and the Adagio is the only part of his Tenth Symphony he lived to finish.

There can be no doubt that this is Thomas's orchestra now, sounding neither like the mellow group led by Pierre Monteux for years, nor like the cooler one fostered more recently by Herbert Blomstedt. There may be orchestras that make

more unified attacks in the strings, but on this occasion it did not matter. All the assembled forces, and the audience, bought into Thomas's vision of this music, and it made for a thrilling evening.

The opening work was the Adagio, in the unedited manuscript version published in fascsimile by Mahler's widow. Thomas powerfully underlined the pain evident throughout the music, pain that had as its proximate cause Alma Mahler's affair with architect Walter Gropius.

The earlier work, Das Klagende Lied, completed when Mahler was twenty, is grandiosely scored for solo voices, large chorus and orchestra. Already the composer seems almost fully formed. Even here the agony of betrayal burns, and there are Mahlerian idiosyncrasies, orchestral colors, chords, melodic fragments and dance rhythms, all of which echo through his music to the last. If this epic tale of chivalric fratricide, fraud and ghostly retribution could not have been composed before Richard Wagner, it certainly could not have been written by anybody except Mahler.

The chorus, beautifully trained by Vance George, made massive sounds with pointed precision, and the orchestra's chief glory, its woodwinds and brass, were brilliant, including those stationed amid percussion batteries high in the balcony. The soloists had little sustained music to sing, sometimes just one word, but they did so splendidly for the most part. Christine Goerke's soprano rang out over the fortissimos with clarity and richness, mezzo Michelle De Young sounded wonderfully golden and involved, and bass Clayton Brainerd boomed his brief lines appropriately. Tenor Jon Villars, who has been singing much Strauss lately, sounded it: he seemed to push against the music.

But it was Thomas's night. He propelled both musicians and listeners along a vivid emotional journey that made the frigid journey home afterwards worth every snowy step.