|
The last thing we expected about
Saturday's performance by the Tulsa
Symphony was that it would sell out.
The show the orchestra presented
earlier this month more than filled
the Chapman Music Hall of the Tulsa
Performing Arts Center, but that
could be attributed to what the
orchestra performed that night: John
Williams' film music and Holst's
"The Planets" with a NASA-themed
slideshow. Popular stuff, in other
words.
But a concert full of tone poems by
Czech and Russian composers, capped
off by a Rachmaninoff piano concerto
performed by a young musician still
in university? One might expect an
evening such as this to draw only
die-hard classical music
aficionados.
Well, it didn't. Or rather, it did.
But it also brought to the theater a
good number of -- I was going to
write "normal people," but that
isn't the right term. This concert
simply attracted people who wanted
to hear good music played well.
And while Saturday night's concert
did not have the visual element of
the Tulsa Symphony's previous show,
it was a grandly theatrical
experience.
That's because the music for the
concert, conducted by Tulsa Opera
general director Carol I. Crawford,
was the sort designed to evoke
images, even stories, in the
listener's mind, from a pastoral
stroll along a Czech river to an
artist's torturous inner struggle
for sanity.
 This
last idea certainly seemed to be at
work in pianist Yuan Jie's
interpretation of the Piano Concerto
No. 2 in C Minor by Rachmaninoff.
Yuan, winner of the piano
competition at the 2006 Crescendo
Awards presented by the Rotary Club
of Tulsa, went at this piece with a
ferocious energy and -- in the first
movement, especially -- a dry,
almost brittle tone.
It emphasized the almost
disassociated, antagonistic quality
of the music in the first movement
-- the piano working out its own
tormented thoughts, the orchestra
countering with calm and reasoned
statements. And just when you
thought the two entities would never
see eye to eye, there came a few
unison notes between piano and
orchestra -- a glimmer of hope and
accord that would be developed in
the rest of the concerto.
Yuan's playing is rambunctious,
seeming at times to be more about
achieving emotional effect than
precision. Nothing wrong with that
-- it always helps to have a player
passionately involved with the
music. And while he excelled at this
concerto's more robust passages, his
playing in the slow second movement
was marked by great feeling and
restraint. This movement also
featured excellent solo work from
the orchestra's principal flute John
Rush and principal clarinet Amanda
McCandless.
Crawford's conducting, and her
interaction with Yuan, was superb
throughout. She was firmly in
control of the orchestra and the
music, so that not a phrase seemed
out of place or wrongly emphasized.
Shouts of "Bravo!" began before the
final note of the concerto had
ceased, and Yuan treated the crowd
to an encore: a rousing performance
of Liszt's piano transcription of
the "Wedding March" from
Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's
Dream."
This was also a rare opportunity to
watch Crawford conduct. That might
seem odd, as she had been leading
Tulsa Opera performances for nearly
15 years. But most of her work is
done in the orchestra pit, which
affords only a glimpse now and then
of what she 's doing on the podium.
Here, the impression one comes away
with is that Crawford's conducting
is more about shaping musical
phrases than anything else. Some
conductors in performance tend to be
very precise about the beat;
Crawford emphasizes the way she
wants the musical line to flow, so
that her gestures appear more to be
sculpting the sound rather than
marking the time.
And it worked to great effect with
the two orchestral pieces on the
program: Smetana's "The Moldau," and
"Scheherazade" by Rimsky-Korsakov.
The Smetana is the more
programmatic, conjuring up images of
babbling brooks, verdant forests,
and hunters riding through same.
One would expect "Scheherazade" to
be even more of the same, as it's
based on the "Arabian Nights" and
has inspired a handful of ballets.
But it's really a way to show off an
orchestra. Rimsky-Korsakov was a
genius at orchestration, and this
piece is designed to bring out all
the sonic possibilities of a
symphonic orchestra.
And the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra's
performance more than lived up to
that ideal, with a rich and dynamic
performance featuring excellent solo
work. Among the most striking were
concertmaster Rossitza Goza, who
performed the violin theme that
snaked throughout the piece; Rush
and McCandless on flute and
clarinet; cellist Kari Caldwell;
bassoonist Laura Leisring; oboist
Lise Glaser; and Bruce Schultz on
French horn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James D. Watts Jr. 581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
|
