In a sense it was Maurice Abravanel's final program Tuesday at the hall that bears his name.
He arranged it. His spirit hovered over it. He even conducted part of it, by way of a recorded encore.The occasion was a memorial service for the Utah Symphony's music director laureate, who died last week at age 90. Selections, performed by the orchestra and chorus under music director Joseph Silverstein, ranged from Gluck's "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" to the concluding chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion - pieces many in the audience were probably introduced to by the late maestro.
In between came his beloved Mahler - the Adagietto from the Symphony No. 5 - cantor Lawrence Loeb's intonation of the kaddish, the ancient Jewish mourner's prayer, and spoken tributes from friends and colleagues.
"Maurice Abravanel was a consummate interpreter of every type of music," said Herold L. Gregory, the symphony's executive director from 1957 to 1986, "and he had an almost unerring sense of what would sell."
The combination was to earn him the respect and affection of countless Utahns over his 32 years at the orchestra's helm. As Ardean Watts, his associate conductor for many years, recalled, "I got handshakes. He got kisses."
"Never have so many done so much for so few," he remembered Abravanel joking after a concert the orchestra played for a rural-Utah audience of 35. But, Watts said, it was that same dedication and pride in his adopted state that got him and the orchestra through the financial crises of their second season together and ultimately took their music to the world.
The result, declared Donald Thulean of the American Symphony Orchestra League, was an orchestra that remains "the epitome of the American orchestral tradition. . . . It could not exist anywhere else in the world. And it would not exist but for the artistic vision, the energy, the humanity and the persuasive power of its conductor laureate."
He was "a born teacher," recalled Daniel R. Gustin of the Tanglewood Music Center, where Abravanel spent his last summers as artist in residence, "with a gift for knowing just the right thing to say to an aspiring musical performer and just the right way to say it."
Once, he said, that took the form of Abravanel telling a young conductor, "I applaud your performance, but the music was a big bore. In fact sitting through it will take the place of 500 years in purgatory for me. Now I can go straight to hell."
Maybe. But it was heaven that was evoked in Tuesday's performances. And that included the encore, Abravanel's own recording of one of the "Gymnopedies" of Erik Satie, ethereal yet unsentimental.
As usual, he had the last word.