Last Saturday marked the opening of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra's 91st season and conductor Philip Rice's fourth season as music director. For this concert, Mr. Rice designed a program that showcased the considerable talents of two of the orchestra's principal players, and challenged the entire orchestra to tackle a work whose performance would have been inconceivable here three years ago: Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. Five in C-sharp Minor, first performed in Cologne, Germany, in 1904.

In his three years as music director, Mr. Rice has transformed the NBSO into one of the top regional orchestras in the country. Typical of the fine young musicians who make up the orchestra are principal harpist Sarah Manning and principal flutist Timothy Macri, two accomplished performers whose technical agility and musical intelligence made up for the thin texture and repetitiveness of Mozart's youthful "French" Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp.

Happy to yield to this irrepressibly sweet and cheerful piece, they dazzled the audience with their enchanting duets and energetic solos. The robust Mr. Macri appeared to be playfully courting Ms. Manning, who with nimble fingers parried his seductive solos with equally seductive solos for the harp. Both played their cadenzas brilliantly, but it was Mr. Macri's charmingly flirtatious imitation of a songbird that finally won Ms. Manning's heart.

Let us hope Mr. Macri, who has been holding master classes in New Bedford's public schools, will be equally successful at wooing young people to love classical music, perhaps repairing some of the damage caused by the savage cuts to the city's art education budget.

Mozart's delightful piece was the perfect foil to the gargantuan Mahler symphony the orchestra performed after intermission. Under Mr. Rice's masterful captaincy, this "titanic" (his phrase) vessel not only stayed afloat, but for every plunge into the depths of Mahler's oceanic "nostalgia for the absolute" (George Steiner's phrase), this magnificent symphony broke through the surface with the audacious energy of a breaching whale soaring toward the sky.

Gustav Mahler believed, "The symphony must be like a world that contains everything at its disposal." Written after personal tragedies and severe hemorrhaging nearly killed him, his fifth symphony begins with a wake-up call from a single unaccompanied trumpet, followed by a massive assault by the brass and percussion that introduces a lugubrious funeral march followed by the Sturm und Drang of wildly conflicting themes. According to Maestro Rice, this symphony contains 214 tempo changes, not counting rallentandi and rubati the conductor may supply.

Throughout the performance of this difficult work, the orchestra displayed phenomenal discipline and restraint. Their musicianship and Mr. Rice's subtle control enabled them to skillfully respond to Mahler's often shockingly abrupt changes of tempo, so that the most treacherous transitions went smoothly.

One of the most stunning instances of the firm but delicate control Maestro Rice and the orchestra are capable of achieving together came at the very end of the turbulent first movement, where Mahler scored a rest followed by a single note marked SF, for sforzando (forcefully).This note, which resolves the tempestuous battle between death and fear on the one hand, and the soul's hopeful yearning for natural innocence and blissful joy on the other, is most often played as a sharp, angry jab, or jolt.
A few conductors have read the score differently, however, and Philip Rice is one of them. The NBSO played this mysterious note as an emphatic but ethereal burst of sound that seemed to create the possibility of a silence so profound that it could only exist in a spiritual realm.

The haunting Adagietto was allegedly written as a love letter to Alma Schindler, Mahler's future wife, but over the years, this achingly beautiful, slow movement has come to seem more like an elegy for the world (or imagined world) of faith, civility and order destroyed by the Franco-Prussian war that foreshadowed the violence of the 20th century. Although some conductors have played this movement faster, Mr. Rice drew from its plangent melody silent tears.

At the end of the symphony, this theme reappears in a joyous transformation that reaffirms the composer's embrace of life. Along with allusions to symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms and German Ländler, dance hall music and Viennese waltzes, this great work concludes with a rondo-finale that is operatic in its lushly lyrical intensity.

After the concert, looking pale as a ghost from the physical and emotional demands of conducting this explosive work, Maestro Rice told reception guests he had only had time for four rehearsals with the orchestra -- a fact that makes this performance an even more extraordinary feat than I had imagined.

Mahler's Fifth Symphony makes enormous demands on the conductor and the instrumentalists. To a man and woman, the brasses played their frequent solos with consummate artistry, especially the velvety trombones. For the strings, Mahler composed music so frenzied that at times Concertmaster Jesse Holstein and his violin section appeared to be trying to saw their instruments into tiny pieces, so vehement was their bowing in certain passages; yet, the overall effect was beautiful.

Several people commented that they were glad not to be subjected to the speeches and exhortations that so annoyed supporters of the symphony before last season's opening night concert. The only pre-performance comment was a necessary one from Mr. Rice, informing the audience that the orchestra would not perform Samuel Barber's School for Scandal Overture because it would make the concert excessively long.

Although that was definitely a wise move, a friend said he actually found himself wishing the 75-minute-long Mahler had lasted longer.

That's an achievement of which the New Bedford Symphony can be proud.

This story appeared on Page B3 of The Standard-Times on October 5, 2005.