Barber, Tchaikovsky and Brahms at the Pacific Symphony

Violinist Vadim Guzman and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra under the baton of visiting conductor Valentina Peleggi perform Brahms’ Violin Concerto.

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

Valentina Peleggi.

The first half of the November concert in the Pacific Symphony’s 2024-2025 season, enjoyed as usual in the glorious acoustic of the Segerstrom Concert Hall, and played under the baton of the Italian guest conductor Valentina Peleggi, projected enough passion and drama to more than satisfy any audience, and judging by the enthusiastic response, Signora Peleggi’s unhackneyed repertoire choices were fully vindicated.

These were two fairly infrequently performed works which are however amongst their composers’ most inspired and powerful creations, and if the more wildly approving response came at the end of Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante, Op. 32, TH 46, that was surely down both to his familiar idiom and to a conclusion that’s torrentially overwhelming even for this most heart-on-sleeve of composers.

For me, though, the gem of the concert was the opener, the First Symphony (in one movement), Op. 9, written by Samuel Barber (1910-1981), when he was still only 26. Barber himself described it as “a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony” and as such it has often been compared with the proto-single movement symphony, Sibelius’s Seventh. But rather than mirroring the latter’s Olympian calm, this work erupts from the starting-gate—here as incisively as one would wish and powerfully propulsive in the hands of the PacSO and Signora Peleggi—into a swirling cauldron of sound.

Undated portrait of Samuel Barber in the leisure
room of the American Academy in Rome.

Showing himself immediately a virtuoso master of the orchestra, Barber in his “first movement” lays out the symphony’s three main themes, which will be developed and recapitulated in its course. But though these are mainly carried by the strings, this happens within a rapidly changing welter of other orchestral activity, and here the balances seemed sometimes a little awry, with key lines momentarily obscured amidst the dramatic onrush.

The “first movement” crashes to a halt in the biggest orchestral explosion yet, and after a timpani diminuendo over two measures, the symphony’s Allegro molto “scherzo” begins with a fugato in the upper strings—in this performance articulated with as much pointful clarity as the previous section seethed with power—that gathers tension and heft until it blows itself out in a hammering ostinato from the full forces. A brief return to the fugato figure, now on bassoon and clarinets, dies away to a long pause before the Andante tranquillo.

This begins with what is essentially a metamorphosis of the second theme of the “first movement,” but such is Barber’s genius that it contrives to sound quite new-minted, and overwhelmingly affecting when played with such long-drawn eloquence as it was by the PacSO’s principal oboist, Jessica Pearlman. As with the previous sections, this “slow movement” grows in textural complexity and harmonic tension until it cadences seismically into the "finale," a passacaglia over a repeated slow-moving theme in cellos and basses that proceeds to a conclusion which would seem extravagantly overblown in its rhetoric were it not justified by the intensity and cumulative sense of something vitally important being uttered that permeate the whole work.

For my money, Samuel Barber’s First is one of the greatest American symphonies of the 20th century, as emotionally engaging as it is ingeniously tight-knit, and fully the equal of any by any contemporary, amongst whom Bernstein and Copland are only the most celebrated. It was a rare joy to hear a live performance of it—doubly so when played and conducted with such skill and commitment as it was by the Pacific Symphony under Signora Peleggi.

Though equally dramatic and affecting, in some ways Francesca da Rimini, which Tchaikovsky completed in November 1876, presents an opposite interpretative challenge. Whereas Barber’s symphony is a complex, kaleidoscopic, and rapidly evolving structure, whose many elements have somehow to be both kept in balance and fully brought out for its performance to be successful, Francesca is essentially a very large-scale ABA form, the three parts of which contain much repetition that needs to be carefully shaped and handled lest the work begin to seem interminable.

Tchaikovsky in 1877, shortly after
 completing Francesca da Rimini.

In his Inferno, Dante records that Francesca and her lover Paolo were condemned for their adulterous liaison to be eternally tormented in the violent winds of the second circle of Hell, and Tchaikovsky conjures this with sustained vehemence. He begins his depiction of the 13th century Italian noblewoman's plight with an evocation of Hell’s portal, here rendered the more awe-inspiringly ominous by the Pacific Symphony's very large tam-tam, on which the last of four strokes ushered in the first main section of the work, Allegro vivo. 

With her sweeping gestures, generously inviting and inclusive rather than pointedly directing, Signora Peleggi drew playing that had all the panache and vigor that the music needed, controlling the pace and dynamics so as to keep Tchaikovsky’s swirling and overlapping motivic patterns airborne. After some 50 pages of score, the tumult finally subsides, giving way to an idyllic recall, Andante cantabile non troppo, of the lovers’ happiness when alive.

As long as many a full-scale symphonic slow movement, this second main section of the work is as full-bloodedly romantic as anything in the composer’s output, and here again Signora Peleggi and the PacSO excelled in giving it all the richness it needs, from the solo clarinet statement of the first main theme (principal Robert Walker matching in eloquence his oboist colleague in the Barber), through successive ecstatic climaxes, to the eventual return of the hellish winds, swirling the shades of the lovers away forever.

Though this final part, Allegro vivo once again, is a truncated repeat of music already very familiar, the performance maintained pressure and momentum, never flagging through to the cataclysmic end, with timpani, cymbals, bass drum and tam-tam (just to nitpick, switching to a smaller instrument here might have given more incisive crashes) punching home eternal damnation. That ovation sure was deserved…

After the interval, to contrast with all that histrionic fervor, came the poised richness of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, with the Ukrainian-born Israeli Vadim Guzman as soloist. The fact that Brahms completed it only a year after Francesca was written underlines what a broad church in terms of expressive range in music is high Romanticism (and not without its internal dissent—Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron Nadezhda von Meck: “Brahms’ concerto appealed to me as little as everything else he has written. Lots of preparations as it were for something, lots of hints that something is going to appear very soon and enchant you, but nothing does come out of it all, except for boredom.”)

Brahms in 1876.

Of course nearly a century-and-a-half of near-universal acclaim for Brahms’ Violin Concerto from academics, audiences, and musicians alike has rendered Tchaikovsky’s opinion a quaint reminder of how even the greatest can have blind spots, and certainly for this listener there wasn’t a boring moment in this relatively fleet (just on 38 minutes) account—cleanly articulated, boldly shaped, subtly detailed—from Maestro Guzman and the Pacific Symphony under Signora Peleggi’s ever-supple direction.

Interestingly, she reduced the string strength by one desk in each section from the full muster deployed in the Barber and Tchaikovsky, and with what looked a quite tight grouping of the players on the platform, this seemed to give more prominence than usual to the manifold beauty and resourcefulness of Brahms’ woodwind writing: at the very start the bassoons and horns seemed more strongly present than usual.

Front and center to the success of this performance, however, was Vadim Guzman, whose virtuosity was so seemingly effortless as to never draw attention to itself, making the solo role first amongst equals with the orchestra but also giving many key passages their necessary prominence. His articulation of the third main theme which Brahms with signal genius introduces at the very end of the first movement exposition, for example, had an ineluctable and throat-catching beauty. 

After an account of the long first movement that felt far less protracted than usual, the woodwind choir introduced the Adagio’s main theme with unforced poise and balance, perfectly preparing the ground for Guzman’s entry, as unshowy and eloquent as ever. Perhaps there wasn’t quite enough ma non troppo to temper the rondo finale’s Allegro giocoso, so that some of its dancing joyousness was sacrificed on the altar of sheer excitement, but it certainly was exciting, and the Segerstrom audience responded accordingly.

Even after this there was an encore, and for once not a piece of solo fireworks designed to show off a soloist's astonishing dexterity, but a limpid account of the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Act Two of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, for which Maestro Guzman was joined by the Pacific Symphony strings in beatifically hushed form.

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Thursday November 13, 2024, 8 p.m.

Images: The performance: Doug Gifford; Samuel Barber: www.samuelbarber.fr; Tchaikovsky and Brahms: Wikimedia Commons.

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Youthful Artists, Mahler, Britten, Dazzle Seattle Audience

REVIEW

SEATTLE SYMPHONY, Benaroya Hall, Seattle

ERICA MINER 

Two youthful artists beguiled the Seattle Symphony audience with their dynamic performances in a vibrant program that highlighted the similarities and contrasts between early works of two composers who were connected in intriguing ways.

In his debut with the orchestra, Australian conductor Nicholas Carter chose to give the Seattle premiere of Benjamin Britten’s vivacious Piano Concerto, Op. 13, and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

Mahler was an inspiration to the young Britten, whose virtuosic concerto is full of energetic rhythms and bold orchestral colors. The performance of this early work was a tour de force for Benjamin Grosvenor, a pianist at the height of his musical powers.

Britten’s work, his first for piano and orchestra and his only concerto for the instrument, is brimming with exuberance and vigor. Premiered in 1938 at the London Proms with the 24-year-old composer as soloist, and revised in 1945, the inventive, mold-breaking and fiendishly difficult work was dedicated to British composer Lennox Berkeley. Previously paired by other orchestras with powerful Mahler pieces such as Das Lied von der Erde, there are moments that bring to mind Mahler’s much later Des Knaben Wunderhorn, as well as Britten’s mature operatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes. Described by Britten as “simple and direct in form,” in reality the concerto is a virtuosic opportunity for a pianist capable of exploiting its challenges, similar in many respects to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, with soupçons of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Grosvenor, acknowledged by Gramophone magazine as one of the top five pianists on record and known for his combination of brilliance and profound musicality, is one of those pianists. In his interpretation, he optimized both the technical and interpretative aspects of the piece so brilliantly as to seem a magician of the keyboard.

The first movement, Toccata: Allegro molto e con brio, gave Grosvenor the opportunity to make the most of the pianistic bravura. The pianist’s opening took off immediately with Shostakovich-like declamation and youthful exuberance as well as exactitude in his spirited pyrotechnics, which continued throughout the movement (what a pianist Britten must have been at that young age!) all the way to the Brahms-like flourish at the end. The huge orchestration showed off the players’ virtuosity its many textures: brass heavy, including special challenges for the high horns. Grosvenor's cadenza glissandi were both spectacular and tasteful. 

The Ravel-like Waltz: Allegretto second movement provided additional orchestral hues in the unusual duo between muted viola and piccolo with added solo clarinet, played with stylistic elegance by all three. Grosvenor exhibited sensitivity and clarity in his interpretation, again with phenomenal technical mastery.  

The movement was followed by the Impromptu: Andante lento, a theme and variations including a quasi cadenza section, in which Grosvenor performed with delicacy and touching introspection. March: Allegro moderato sempre a la marcia provided a smart ending for the work, evoking the first movement and driving toward a climax of rhythmic potency. Britten pays respect to his inspiration, Mahler, in the dotted rhythms and in the challenging trumpet fanfares. The soloist brought the piece to an end with a rousing flourish that brought the audience to their feet.

With Britten’s concerto providing a robust opening, the festive atmosphere continued with Mahler’s ever popular Symphony No. 1 in D Major. The work is astonishing in that the young composer was courageous enough to include panoplies of orchestral delights in his first symphonic effort evoking a gamut of emotions, compared to Brahms, who waited until a more mature period of his compositional life to take on the symphonic genre. Mahler’s work reflects his own heroic journey as he envisioned it.

After the slow, Nature-inspired tranquil introduction of the first moment, the 28-year-old composer evokes his earlier Lieder eines farhrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) in the Allegro section, continuing the Nature theme derived from the words “Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld” (“I went this Morning over the Field”). Carter underscored the Wagnerian “Forest Murmurs” aspects of the piece with gentility and reverence.

The movement’s upbeat ending gives the robust Scherzo second movement notable impact, both in the beginning and in the wistful waltz of the middle section. Done with spirited movements from Carter, one could envision his leaping from the podium and dancing a Ländler. 

The third movement provides repeated contrasts between its funereal opening melody, the wild klezmer music that Mahler heard while he was growing up, and the introspective interval of delicacy in the middle section, again quoting Fahrenden Gesellen. Carter exploited the poignancy of the movement with gentle yet emotionally fraught gestures.

The stormy final movement was tempestuous and exciting. Carter contrasted the frenzied initial theme with the peaceful tranquility of the second theme, building to the ebullient climax and ending the evening with Mahlerian bravado and heroism, a bold and decisive personalized hero’s journey foreshadowing Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.

There is no doubt Carter is a born conductor and no surprise that his talent has been recognized by luminaries in his field, among them Vladimir Ashkenazy, Simone Young and Sir Donald Runnicles. Carter’s dramatic, perfectly paced rendering of the much-loved Mahler work showed great polish beyond his years and reflected his operatic background as Chief Conductor of Oper Bern, Switzerland. He is fascinating to watch, showing his joy with gestures that are exuberant yet always precise and controlled; ever energetic, at times seeming to levitate above the podium.

It’s no wonder the orchestra responded with an impassioned performance, demonstrating virtuosity in each section. Mahler’s First especially demands the ne plus ultra of trumpet playing. The musicians delivered on that challenge beautifully and consistently. Both monumental works were perfectly matched in their brashness and sensitivity, helmed and rendered with great panache by two outstanding young artists: a program to delight all tastes. 

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Benaroya Hall, 200 University Street, Seattle, WA, Saturday, November 16, 2024, 8:00 p.m.

Images: Carlin Ma

More All-American Soundscapes at Long Beach

Clayton Stephenson, soloist with the Long Beach Symphony under Music Director Eckart Preu in
the November performance of George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

The second concert in the Long Beach Symphony’s 90th Anniversary Classical season illustrated some intersections between inherited European “classical” structural forms and American popular and vernacular music idioms, as represented in works by the African-American William Grant Still (1895-1978), high-flying New Yorker Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981), and the irrepressibly gifted George Gershwin (1898-1937).

William Grant Still.

William Grant Still certainly embraced the symphony as a form, writing five in all, but as with those of Robert Schumann, their numbered order does not follow the chronology of their composition—or at least of those that followed Still’s Symphony No. 2 in G minor “Song of a New Race,” written in 1937 and included by the LBSO under its then recently-appointed Music Director Eckart Preu in the 2017 Veterans Day concert (reviewed here).

Still completed a third symphony in 1945, but then withdrew it. His fourth, entitled “Autochthonous,” followed two years later, and then in 1958 he wrote a “Sunday Symphony” as a replacement for the still-withdrawn third—somewhat oddly, as to have let chronology designate the “Autochthonous” and “Sunday” as No. 3 and No. 4 would seem more logical. As it was, he revised that 1945 No. 3 in 1958 or 1970 (sources differ), and it was premiered as Symphony No. 5 “Western Hemisphere” in December 1970 to celebrate Still’s 75th birthday.

Eckart Preu.

It would be interesting to know whether the 1945 score is still extant, as that would reveal how extensive the revision was. While its predecessor symphonies, in particular the “Afro-American” (No. 1), embrace influences from the blues, jazz, and spirituals, Symphony No. 5 seems an affirmation of sterner stuff, notably in its first movement, an extraordinarily terse three-minute span, ominous from the outset, and some distance from any ethnic influences. Hearing it played with steely trenchancy by the LBSO under Maestro Preu, one wondered whether Still had pared it down from a more loose-limbed original.

By contrast, the languorous and becalmed slow movement—adrift in the bayou perhaps—was embodied by the LBSO strings at their silkiest. As Preu noted in his introductory remarks, this symphony is characterized by steady, even rhythms—in the first movement a resolute onward tread, in the second a soft, background pulse, and in the third, filling the scherzo slot but with no contrasting trio section, a relentless drive, punctuated by slashing string figures slightly reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s iconic Psycho motif.

Again in sharp contrast, the finale juxtaposes spiky determination and warm lyricism, leading to a radiantly optimistic “big tune” and jubilant conclusion. This performance, led and played with great conviction, made the best case one could imagine for Still’s Fifth Symphony, and was notably more alert and focused than its only commercial recording. But doubts remained as to its coherence and symphonic viability, particularly regarding the unwontedly gnomic first movement. Was Still’s revision of the 1945 original score just too brutal a slash and burn?

Jessie Montgomery.

Jessie Montgomery’s 2017 Coincident Dances was the program opener—in her own words “inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood.” Prefaced by what George Gershwin might have called its “icebreaker”—a double-bass solo that gave section principal Geoffrey Osika a rare moment in the spotlight—Coincident Dances is cast in two distinct spans, the second here introduced by a trumpet riff from Principal Ryan Darke.

The work’s 12 skillfully intricate minutes seemed to be rendered the more transparent by the side and rear acoustic baffles now installed on the Terrace Theater’s platform, but its timbral and rhythmic variety failed to conceal a pervasive harmonic sameness. In the end, for this listener Coincident Dances didn’t seem to add up to very much or travel anywhere notable, particularly when compared to, say, Duke Ellington’s own aural NYC tour, the cumulatively powerful Harlem, included in the LBSO’s 2022-2023 season finale and reviewed here.

Not being a native-born American with the sounds of George Gershwin absorbed as natally as mother’s milk, for me his Piano Concerto in F from 1925 was relatively unfamiliar, and maybe its sheer unexpectedness was one reason why this smoking firebrand of a performance by Clayton Stephenson, with the LBSO and Maestro Preu matching him every step of the way through all the myriad quicksilver twists and turns of rhythm, harmony, and timbre, made such a powerful impression in the second half of the program.

George Gershwin.

Hot on the heels of Rhapsody in Blue’s sensational success, Gershwin, still only in his mid-20s, was asked by Walter Damrosch, director of the New York Symphony Orchestra, to write a full-scale piano concerto for it. The miracle is that, clearly unfazed neither by the prestigious assignment nor the genre’s looming storied past, he took the standard three-movement concerto form and made it entirely his own, from the defiant / triumphant percussion flourish that opens the first movement’s introduction to the solo tam-tam smash that heralds the finale’s exultant coda.

At around 34 minutes, the duration of this performance was a little longer than average for the work, but far from being down to any unwonted trudging, this was the result of much exquisitely attenuated rubato coordinated as of a single thought between soloist, orchestra and conductor, amidst tempi that throughout responded with consummate flexibility to the ebb and flow of Gershwin’s jazz-inspired score.

Eckart Preu and Clayton Stephenson
at the post-concert reception.

Particularly memorable were the superbly bluesy clarinets that opened the central movement Adagio, leading to an equally haunting account of the trumpet solo that in turn gave way to Stephenson’s idiomatic delineation of the movement’s main theme. Then, after its last long-drawn cadence, the opening of the Allegro agitato finale, though not marked attacca, immediately erupted like a Belmont thoroughbred thundering out of its starting stall.

Even by the elevated standards of recent LBSO/Preu concerto performances, this partnering with Clayton Stephenson was quite exceptional, and was rewarded with a standing ovation that showed no signs of stopping until Mr. Stephenson stilled the cheers by sitting down to deliver a rocket-propelled encore, Hiromi Uehara’s The Tom and Jerry Show. And even this wasn’t the end, as he once again took the piano stool for a last Gershwinian reminiscence—Fazil Say’s arrangement of Summertime Variations. 

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, November 9, 2024, 7.30 p.m.

Images: Clayton Stephenson, Eckart Preu: courtesy Long Beach Symphony; 

Eckart Preu: Caught in the Moment Photography; William Grant Still: wrti90.1; Jessie Montgomery: composer website; Gershwin: Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress.

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