Jonathan Blumhofer
The recording was made in December 2010 in San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, and reveals an orchestra fully at home in John Adams’ distinctive idiom.
Perhaps most remarkably, BSO conductor Stéphane Denève managed to create an atmosphere in which the Symphony Hall audience, which at this time of year sometimes sounds like it’s made up of inpatients from a tuberculosis ward, was utterly captivated: even the quietest moments were accompanied by a welcomed, attentive silence.
To judge from the all-around energetic playing of the BSO, it seems conductor Jaap van Zweden has struck a good rapport with the players and I, for one, look forward to hearing more from him in coming seasons.
This is a book for anyone interested not just in the economic state of the symphony orchestra, but in the overall financial health of the arts in the United States.
After the “Lobgesang”’s premiere, Robert Schumann declared this movement “a glimpse of heaven filled with Raphael’s madonnas,” and Saturday’s performance by the BSO came about as close to that as one could imagine, sensitively phrased and beautifully blended.
Though there were differences in quality between the compositions in the BMOP concert, all of the pieces fulfilled the primary requirement of a concerto: they showed off the capabilities of the solo instrument in question, often memorably so.
Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, is a big man who conducts with big gestures. In the first half of “The Rite of Spring” I wasn’t quite sure if his podium mannerisms (which culminated in jumping jacks during the concluding “Dance of the Earth”) were helpful or distracting.
In a nice twist, no piece on the Concord Chamber Players program was written before 1907, and that oldest piece came from a fine composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, whose music has fallen somewhat by the wayside since his death in 1922.
The extraordinary intensity the ensemble achieved at soft dynamic levels and their very natural sense of the movement’s pacing were both quite impressive.
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