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.

---ooo---

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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