George Hanson’s long, sweet Tucson goodbye drew to a close on Tuesday as he took the stage at Tucson Music Hall for the final time as the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s music director.
He ended 19 years at the podium with a concert featuring a program of German composers and renown violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth.
On tap was Mozart’s playful Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro,” Beethoven’s equally playful Symphony No. 8 in F major, and Brahms dramatically beautiful Double Concerto, featuring Zukerman and Forsyth in what was arguably one of the most inspired and intimate performances the TSO has experienced in recent years.
The Brahms is the closest thing to what could be called Zukerman's and Forsyth's song. They’ve played it so much over the years — including in February as a goodbye to the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, where he is the outgoing music director and she is leaving her post as principal cellist at the end of the season — that they can anticipate one another’s moves right down to the eye twitches. Throughout the 32-minute performance, Forsyth would smile after she had matched musical wits with her husband of 10-plus years. He would finish a complex, beautiful passage and she would take over the theme on her cello in a way that looked far too easy. It was almost as if the Brahms had become part of their musical DNA, naturally woven into their intuition so that we couldn’t determine where it had ended and they began.
Hanson and the orchestra were wonderful accompanists for the couple. Brahms wrote the Double Concerto as a showpiece for the cello and the orchestra often finds itself the silent partner. But Hanson made sure their silence spoke volumes.
The Brahms capped a program that included terrific performances by the orchestra and Hanson of Mozart’s “Figaro” Overture and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. There was an energy and passion to both performances that was invigorating and made you half wish that at the end of “Figaro,” the fully staged opera would play on just so you could hear the orchestra continue with Mozart’s wonderful score.
At the end of the Beethoven, Hanson brought the orchestra’s longtime head stage manager G. Mark Sandberg on stage. He called Sandberg the “only person I trust to watch after my watch, given to me by Leonard Bernstein.” Tuesday night apparently also was Sandberg’s final TSO concert as he leaves for retirement.
Before an audience that nearly filled Music Hall — including a couple dozen young kids that looked to be no older than 12 or 13 — Hanson presented Sandberg with his “Mahler stick,” a baton he has used in countless Mahler performances including when the TSO performed its first ever Mahler Symphony No. 3 in mid-March.
