Beethoven, Bluegrass, and Danzón at Long Beach

Composer Michael Torke, violinist Tessa Lark, and Music Director Eckart Preu discuss Torke’s
violin concerto Sky before the performance with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra.

REVIEW

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

DAVID J BROWN

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The Long Beach Symphony’s first classical concert of 2025 under its Music Director Eckart Preu gave what might well be regarded as a typical Preu program: a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of music by living composers, in this case a highly listenable pairing of works, based on popular music idioms as is often the case, from both sides of the US/Mexico border, together with a familiar Classical masterpiece.

Arturo Márquez.

First up was Danzón No. 2 (1994) by the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez (b. 1950). Like the ubiquitous No. 5 of Villa-Lobos’s nine Bachianas Brasileiras, this is by far the most familiar and frequently performed of Márquez’s nine Danzóne, and as with the Brazilian icon’s sequence, it’s regrettable that its popularity has masked what its companion pieces may offer.

That said, Danzón No. 2 instantly beguiled the ear, with its haunting and deceptively easy-going opening, a clarinet solo melody over light claves+piano+strings accompaniment which rapidly spreads through the rest of the orchestra and then twists, turns, and evolves over the next nine minutes or so through many changes of pace, dynamic, texture, and rhythm.

These are often abrupt and unexpected, reflecting the complex formalities of this Latin-American dance form (cf. the Wikipedia entry on Danzón), and one got the impression that Márquez’s work is far from being an easy piece to bring off, but the LBSO navigated it with skill, commitment, and minimal obvious gear-changes under Preu’s meticulous direction.

Michael Torke.

For anyone like me whose experience of bluegrass is confined to the dueling banjos scene in the movie Deliverance, the Wikipedia page on the genre is also pretty useful. Absent that, however, Maestro Preu’s pre-concert conversation with composer Michael Torke (b. 1961) and violinist Tessa Lark really gave all the background needed to enjoy the former’s violin concerto Sky (2018).

The composer emphasized that what the audience was going to hear was not bluegrass pure and simple, but a concerto inspired by and imbued with the bluegrass idiom, written specifically for Ms. Lark and inspired by her own Kentuckian origins and background, and involvement with bluegrass and Appalachian music.

Sky’s three movement titles eschew Italianate or Germanic formality. The first, headed Lively, leads off with nimble offbeat rhythms and banjo-picking technique transferred to the violin, with more than a hint of Irish jig to recall the region’s ethnic origins, and the whole extended and deepened by an aspiring, somewhat Coplandesque, wide-open-spaces motif that from time to time climbs through the orchestra. The slow second movement’s Irish sensibility exactly matches its title, Wistful, while the Spirited finale is jazzily airborne throughout.

Given that Sky is lightly scored for just double woodwind, four brass, minimal percussion, harp and strings, there’s nowhere for anyone to hide, and its success in performance crucially needs all concerned to be in sync with its idiom, and upon needle-sharp interactions between soloist, conductor, and orchestra, both individually and collectively.

Fortunately this was exactly what it got at Long Beach, with everyone on the platform clearly having a blast, as did the audience judging by the enthusiastic applause between the movements and standing ovation for Ms. Lark at the end.

It’s beginning to look as though Eckart Preu is building towards a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with his orchestra. If so, in this concert he reached the mid-point (though not in terms of the works’ chronological order) when having given the Eroica and Ninth in 2019, the Seventh in 2021, and the Fifth in 2022, he ended the program with the Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21.

This was an interesting, and indeed somewhat brave choice. There has been a tendency by commentators and critics rather to downplay the First Symphony (1799-1800) as a relatively modest precursor to the larger-scaled Second, which in turn is seen as a culmination of the Classical symphony before Beethoven blew the genre’s boundaries asunder with the Eroica. The great English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey called Symphony No. 1 a “comedy from beginning to end…” and it often forms the modest and shortish first half before the splendors of Beethoven's Ninth or a symphony by Bruckner or Mahler, or in a program trifecta along with, say a mid-period Haydn symphony and a Mozart piano concerto.

Miniature of Beethoven, painted in
1801 by Christian Hornemann.

Maestro Preu was having none of this. In his pre-concert talk he remarked how edgy and challenging the First can sound, the work of a supremely gifted and confident 30-year-old who was already the unquestioned pianistic conqueror of the Vienna salons, and now pushing his credentials onward and outward as a symphonic composer. And Tovey’s comment goes on that it “… is prophetic of changes in music no less profound than those which the French Revolution brought about in the social organism.”

With no trimming down from the Long Beach Symphony’s current full string strength of 14-12-10-8-6, and with every repeat observed, this was just about as “big” a performance of Beethoven’s symphonic debut as the score can take, but it stayed well on the right side of bombast and any sense of being overblown due to keen observance of its many sudden shifts in dynamic, characterful contributions from the full Classical band of double winds that Beethoven uses so extensively and resourcefully, and tempi that took no prisoners.

The first and last movements were close to Beethoven’s very fast metronome marks, challenging the large body of strings to articulate cleanly all that rapid figuration, and the nominal Menuetto became a trenchant scherzo under Maestro Preu’s energetic baton. Most illuminating of all, though, was the Andante cantabile, whose qualifying con moto was so keenly observed that the movement became a deliciously tripping promenade rather than the dullish trudge it can sometimes be.

Stuffy old purists might have winced when the virus of between-movement applause spread from the Torke to the Beethoven, but there was no doubt that the LBSO on top form deserved it, and the concluding enthusiasm from a remarkably full house was not something this particular symphony often gets. It’s good to see that in the 2025-2026 LBSO Classical season Maestro Preu’s Beethoven cycle will continue with the Pastoral, amongst his customary combination of the new and enterprising plus welcome familiarity. Looking forward!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, February 1, 2025, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: FERNVJR at FVPhotography; Arturo Márquez: Wikimedia Commons; Michael Torke: Bryan Hainer, c/o composer website; Beethoven: Beethovenhaus-Bonn.

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