By Glenn Pillsbury
March 12, 2010 10:20 AM
Exploring two very different understandings of what it has meant to be a Russian composer, the Stockton Symphony continued its Classics series Thursday evening at Atherton Auditorium. The program repeats Saturday.
The concert opened with a world premiere of “Fanfare” for an extended brass ensemble by American composer Paul Turok. The symphony's dedication to premiering a new work each season is laudable even if the actual results are mixed, as they were with this piece.
The work's small-scale instrumentation and length felt out of place on a symphony stage and the actual music too unsettled to do justice to the fanfare genre. The second section of the piece contained some interesting textural effects, but the surrounding music seemed to lack a larger shape and gave the audience too little to latch onto.
However, in their spirited presentation of Shostakovich's “Cello Concerto No. 1,” cellist David Requiro and conductor Peter Jaffe have highlighted a compelling and infectious mid-20th century concerto that is too rarely performed.
Though he was interested in pushing the boundaries of the forms in which he worked, Shostakovich always kept a distinct sense of musical familiarity in his music. Written in 1959 in the midst of a watchful Soviet bureaucracy, his cello concerto is definitely a modern work, but in its rhythmic energy and confident solo line it provides audiences with just the right amount of recognizable tradition.
Digging into the piece's opening four-note motto, Requiro quickly jelled with the orchestra. The pulsating perpetual motion of the orchestra pushed the soloist forward and where he stopped principal horn Lindsay Brown frequently took over, creating a kind of concerto-within-a-concerto interplay that spanned the entire work.
Requiro made some of the most sublime music of the evening in the concerto's second movement. Working against a subdued base of muted strings whose yearning is not dissimilar to Barber's famous “Adagio”, he infused the solo line with real emotion.
There was also a palpable sense of inner conflict as the soloist's attempts at breaking out of the main theme's melancholy and into something -- anything -- else are impossible to sustain.
Indeed, Requiro's magnificent performance of the theme's final statement, transformed into artificial harmonics high in the instrument's register, imbued that inner conflict with an unearthly quality and made for a beautiful and haunting transition to the third movement.
The rhapsodic character of the third movement challenges the cellist to be both expressive and technically virtuosic. Unaccompanied by the orchestra for nearly six minutes, cadenza's disparate parts can threaten to lose focus and coherence. Yet Requiro deftly and confidently handled the extreme register shifts and angular melodies of the movement, and his performance gave the music a shape that kept the music connected to a larger narrative.
Following intermission, the orchestra gave a confident and powerful reading of Tchaikovsky's “Symphony No. 5”, written in 1888 during the heated debates among Russian composers regarding the importance of writing in a nationalist Russian style.
Finally leading an orchestra at full strength after two pieces using reduced forces, Jaffe's engagement with this work was noticeably different: he clearly relished the piece's lush melodies and dance-like rhythms as a kind of artistic reward following the task of introducing two new and challenging works.
The orchestra's execution throughout was exuberant, and set within the piece were many opportunities for solos by the wind section. In particular, Lindsay Brown's performance of the famous horn melody in the second movement was well done, marking a successful cap to an unusually active night for an orchestral soloist.
Principal bassoonist Nicolasa Kuster was also busy, especially in the lyrical waltz of the third movement. She played with a warmth and agility that made the most of the opportunity to feature an instrument typically reserved for textural color and harmonic support duties.
Fittingly for this program, Tchaikovsky filled the brisk and rousing drive of the symphony's final moments with robust fanfares of a very different and more successful sort than those which had opened the concert. Immersed in a thick wall of resounding brass and soaring strings, Jaffe brought the evening to an exhilarating conclusion.
David Requiro
With: Stockton Symphony
When: 6 p.m. Saturday
Where: Atherton Auditorium, San Joaquin Delta College
Admission: $10-$55
Information: (209) 546-8267
