Tag Archives: Terry Maskin

Mei-Ann Chen Rocks the Knight in CSO Debut

Review: Bruch’s Violin Concerto with Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

2023~Bruch Violin-18We’ve been hearing about numerous identified and unidentified flying objects in recent weeks, emanating from numerous sectors of the globe, crossing over our nation’s territorial waters and seeking all sorts of military and meteorological intelligence. Less mysteriously, there have been precise predictions in recent months of astral objects whistling through our solar system, one of them brushing closer to dear Earth than the moon.

But until now, not a word about the meteor that struck the Knight Theater in the heart of Uptown Charlotte. Her name is Mei-Ann Chen, and we can only hope that the guest conductor now in our midst is vying for the vacant music directorship at the Charlotte Symphony. It would be grossly unfair, no doubt, but it wouldn’t a bad idea to sign her up before she left town.

Chen’s impact on – and appeal to – the Symphony’s musicians and subscribers was nothing short of electric.2023~Bruch Violin-09_Export

The orchestra had never performed Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Overture in C Major before, yet they attacked the work zestfully, conveying its sharp contrasts and drama with unmistakable fervor. Flutist Amy Orsinger and principal oboist Hollis Ulaky excelled, jointly and separately, in the piece’s gentler moments. Although we had heard the CSO play the BRUCH VIOLIN CONCERTO as recently as 2016, Chen ignited the ensemble with fresh fire rather than receding to a subsidiary role behind concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu.

Instead of deferring to the soloist – or even seeking an agreeable balance between orchestra and violinist – Chen laid the gauntlet down to them both, so that Lupanu and Symphony spurred each other to greater heights vying for supremacy, achieving a higher level of parity through their combat. More adventurous now than I can recall, Lupanu was nearly note-perfect all the way through the treacherous terrain of the Allegro energico finale while his attack, confidence, and feeling were never better. His command was certainly impressive throughout the opening Allegro moderato, with a transition to the slow middle movement that was amorously smooth. Principal flutist Victor Wang helped to make this Adagio extra exquisite.

As the concerto climaxed, it might have been a toss-up to many in the audience whether Chen was inspiring the CSO or vice-versa. In respect for your colleagues, you’re not going to urge an orchestra too insistently to give us more during a performance – that has to have happened behind the scenes in rehearsal.

Our first glimpse of what that might have been like came right after the concerto, when Chen gestured to the audience to give Lupanu more love for his sterling performance. After the break, our impressions grew more vivid as Chen picked up a mic at the podium and greeted us. Not satisfied with our “Good evening!” Chen urged us to make a second try, somehow infusing this tired old emcee shtick with new energy and spontaneity – and getting results.2023~Bruch Violin-23

Speaking about the works on tonight’s program, Chen included info we could have gleaned from the program – a practice that Christof Perick and Christopher Warren-Green staunchly resisted – and made an effort to link the pieces together with a common theme. Faced with a crowd that was significantly more numerous than the crowd I’d seen three weeks earlier, but still significantly short of Knight’s capacity, Chen declared that Charlotte should be more supportive toward its Symphony.

That was a more compelling statement after delivering two examples of our musicians performing at their peak.

Chen rightly surmised that the main draw of the evening was the Bruch, since the César Franck Symphony in D minor, originally slated for its revival last March, hadn’t been heard in the Queen City since November 2003. Now that was a pitifully attended concert at Belk Theater, after striking CSO musicians had settled on a new contract and returned to work, so Symphony subscribers can pat themselves on the back for improving on that turnout.2023~Bruch Violin-10_Export

The main link between the two Francks that I’ve seen was the fine work by Terry Maskin on the cor anglais solo in the middle Allegretto movement. In the outer Allegro movements, our brass proved its mettle once again, though we’ve surely seen a Chening of the guard during the intervening decades. Associate concertmaster Joseph Meyer distinguished himself in the early Lento of the opening and principal French hornist Byron Johns had outstanding moments when the music quickened.

Chen improved most on the Perick performance of 2003 in the Allegretto, livening the effect of Maskin’s soulfulness on the English horn with more standout work from Johns and Andrea Mumm Trammell’s delicacy on the harp. Before the brass brought the finale to its brash climax, CSO’s principal harpist bubbled up tellingly in the symphony’s last calming episode.

Obviously content with her musicians’ handiwork, Chen gave the audience opportunity after opportunity to show the appreciation she had previously asked for. With unmistakable cues, Chen called upon us – already giving them a standing O – to really let the musicians hear it as she prompted them individually and collectively to take their well-earned bows. We did.

[If you missed Mei-Ann Chen in Charlotte, you can catch up with her on June 7, when the Chicago Sinfonietta music director conducts Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” at Spoleto Festival USA.]

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

“Deadly Sins” Upstage Jazzy Ravel in Fun-Filled CSO Concert

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Ravel’s Piano Concerto

By Perry Tannenbaum

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January 28, 2022, Charlotte, NC – You could arguably call it a facelift. After Charlotte Symphony’s powerful performance of Mahler’s somber, morbid, mercurial, epic, and sometimes phantasmagorical Ninth Symphony, almost everything seemed changed two weeks later. A new conductor was onstage, Australia-born maestra Jessica Cottis, making her Queen City debut. All six guest artists were making their debuts in Symphony’s Classics Series, and even the site of their musicmaking was different, moving southward from Belk Theater at the Blumenthal PAC to Knight Theater at Levine Avenue of the Arts. Most transformative was the music, a kaleidoscopic multinational program connected by a distinct American thread.

The headliner on the program was Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto, last performed by Symphony in 2013 when the wondrous Pascal Rogé made his Belk Theater debut at the keyboard. Jesse Montgomery’s folksy, bluegrass-flavored Strum preceded the main event, when Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear seated himself at the Steinway. Cottis had plenty more excitement in store for us after intermission, plunging into Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka, for a Young Elephant – actually written at choreographer George Balanchine’s request in 1942 for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey’s massive troupe of not-yet-controversial young elephants. Uncannily, another Balanchine commission rounded out the program, Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (1932) with lyrics by Bertold Brecht – obviously written for people rather than pachyderms.2022~Ravel Piano Concerto-36

Nearly a year ago, Montgomery’s Starburst aptly keynoted a program that showcased Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”). Longer and decidedly sunnier, Strum set the tone for CSO’s American evening as perfectly as the title readied us for a work written exclusively for strings. Reading Montgomery’s program notes, chronicling the various incarnations of the piece, we get the sense of experiencing its evolution as it unfolds, for it bounces around among three principal string players before beginning its breathtaking ascent to full power and beauty. Laying out the first pizzicatos, violist Benjamin Geller was soon joined by cellist Alan Black, strumming and then bowing. But it was concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu’s treacherous entrance that truly ignited the fray, triggering Montgomery’s ricochet effects and banjo-like strumming.

Honestly, the performance by CSO became a more massive, lovelier, and less ferocious thing than the studio version by the Catalyst Quartet on Montgomery’s 2015 Strum CD. With a full string orchestra came more majesty when the main melodies were revealed – and extra bite when the piece ended with a collective pizzicato. Nor are “folksy” and “bluegrass” any less flattering in describing Montgomery’s music here than they are in describing many of Aaron Copland’s signature works.2022~Ravel Piano Concerto-01

From the first time I saw him in 2017, playing all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in a single day at Savannah Music Festival, Goodyear stamped himself in my mind as a prodigious talent. Prior to those three three-hour immersions, Goodyear’s distillation of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, on his 2015 solo CD, had clued me in. The soloist starts at a disadvantage in the Ravel Piano Concerto, having to follow the famed whipcrack that launches the opening Allegramente. Not to worry, Goodyear showed his mastery of the bluesy and jazzy licks of the movement soon afterwards, and harpist Andrea Mumm Trammell had a lovely interlude.

Inspired by Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Ravel’s middle movement drew absolutely mesmerizing lyricism from Goodyear, with English hornist Terry Maskin as stellar behind him as he was for Rogé. Yet everyone on the Knight stage seemed most inspired by the concluding Presto. Goodyear unleashed dazzling intensity and bravura, never easing up on the tempo, and the ensemble didn’t merely keep up: they seemed to be prodding their guest to play faster. Turbulence from the winds, brass, and percussion made the climax even more exhilarating.

Apparently, music for dancing elephant isn’t classified as ballet, since it doesn’t appear on The Robert Craft Edition of The Ballets on the notoriously completist Naxos label. Yet Stravinsky never disavowed his Balanchine bagatelle, conducting “Circus Polka” among his voluminous recordings of his own works, where it clocked in at a modest 3:27 on Columbia. Why this rambunctious crowdpleaser isn’t played more often as a concert appetizer is beyond me. While Cottis and the Symphony may have been a tad helter-skelter where Ravel called for more élan, they were marvelously attuned to Igor’s riotous absurdities, his brassy bombast, and the celebratory glee of his wild, galumphing jamboree. It seemed to start in mid-parade before the dainty spots hilariously evoked the pachyderm pixies.2022~Ravel Piano Concerto-31

The zaniness had hardly begun. Bass-baritone Reginald Powell, dressed in a flowery kitchen apron in order to portray the mother of our tempted/temptress heroine, led a barbershop quartet across the stage, sitting down at the end of their march behind a bank of microphones. Strange accessories for a classical concert. So Seven Deadly Sins was classical with a three-penny Kurt Weill twist. Nor was this an opera, though a cabaret table and some props were set in place before our chanteuse, soprano Lindsay Kesselman as Anna I + II, made her/their noire-ish entrance in a spymaster trench coat.2022~Ravel Piano Concerto-37

More than a hint of decadent vaudeville came with her, since each of the nine sections of Weill’s confection was heralded by an old-timey placard placed onto an easel. Prologue, Epilogue, Greed, and the gang were all embroidered with an apt skull-and-crossbones motif. Sad to say, much of this flavorful creativity was outweighed by Charlotte Symphony’s failure to provide supertitle projections once Anna I + II began vocalizing with her/their Family. A few audience members down with us in the orchestra section had the temerity to fire up their cellphones, where they had previously downloaded Symphony’s digital program, so they could follow along.

Not the best experience when you’re trying to keep up with columns of German and English on your iPhone while there is also action onstage to follow. The magnitude of this blunder would only be compounded if you returned home, flipped through the digital program, and discovered that the translation was written by life partners W.H. Auden & Chester Kallman, esteemed poets and librettists in their own rights – they worked on Stravinsky operas! Not only does their Deadly Sins translation rhyme, the syllable counts of every line meticulously match Brecht’s text. Learning that all five vocalists had North Carolina roots – and afterwards listening on Spotify to a recording with the Auden-Kallman lyrics – only deepened my incredulity.

Everyone at Knight Theater, singers and audience alike, could have been so comfortable, and all Brecht’s wit, irony, and satire could have been so clear!

Stepping up to one of mics, Cottis was helpful in her introductory remarks in laying out Brecht’s storyline, which is basically Anna’s odyssey across seven American cities on a mission to sustain her family back home in Louisiana, encountering one of the deadlies in each locale. Ideally, the Balanchine concept is fulfilled when Anna I is the soprano and Anna II is a sublime dancer. Part of the comedy that got lost when Kesselman was both Annas was in the lopsidedness of the dialogue between them. Anna II has very little to say.2022~Ravel Piano Concerto-28

The staging helped this decadent Weill bauble to upstage Ravel’s merriment – or at least prevented it from being an anticlimax. Kesselman soon peeled off her trench coat, revealing an evening dress as the Family’s Sloth along the Mississippi River transitioned to Pride as Anna II took a job in Memphis as a cabaret dancer. Anna added a flaming red boa encountering Wrath in LA, and an uncredited lighting designer made a similarly lurid choice illuminating the Knight’s acoustic shell. Purple became apropos for Gluttony in Philly, a lighter pinkish red presided over Lust in Boston, and a dark golden hue settled in over Baltimore when she battled Greed. So I had to think that nobody wanted to offend New York during the Great Depression.

Need we say that when Anna’s journeying ended with Envy in San Fran, where Kesselman made her final grand entrance as a rich celeb, totally soused and brandishing a nearly empty bottle of vodka, that the stage was flooded in a deep dark green? Didn’t think so.

A wonderful ending to a melodious, fun-filled, and dance-filled evening. Even without dancers. Facelift and uplift.

Originally published on 1/30 at CVNC.org

Despite Benched Clarinets, Charlotte Symphony Shines in Mozart and Handel

Review: Mozart’s Great G Minor Symphony at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

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April 24, 2021, Charlotte, NC – Exactly one year after I last saw the Charlotte Symphony in live performance at Belk Theater, the Orchestra returned to that same stage with music director Christopher Warren-Green at the podium. Much had changed. String players were all masked in the midst of the ongoing pandemic – and socially distanced, reducing their number to 22. Performing with the Symphony strings for the first time in a year, seven wind players were spread out across the upstage, socially distanced from one another, even more distanced from the strings, and slightly elevated above them.

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Apparently, the spread left no room for the two clarinets that Mozart added to his revised version of Symphony No. 40, so originalism was forced to prevail. The most heartbreaking austerity, however, was the continued absence of an audience, myself included. Keeping Mozart under wraps for seven Saturdays, along with Handel’s “Entrance of the Queen of Sheba,” Symphony did not stream their March 6 concert until this past weekend.

That seemed more than ample time to perfect the audio and engineering for prime time, but when I screened the concert on Saturday on my desktop computer, feeding the audio to my estimable home theater setup, my audiophile sensibilities were appalled by the missing clarity, definition, transparency, and stereo imaging that emerged from my loudspeakers. Hoping for an enhanced experience, I switched to the YouTube version and streamed the concert through the same sound system on Chromecast.

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The difference was decisive. All the sounds blossomed and fell into place. It was emotional for me just to see principal oboist Hollis Ulaky and principal English hornist Terry Maskin returning to action on Saturday night after their long absence, playing prominent roles almost from the opening measures as they personified the Queen of Sheba while the strings represented King Solomon and his court. But I needed the YouTube version to discern Maskin layering onto Ulaky with a second oboe and to fully savor the beauty of their duets.

“Entrance of the Queen of Sheba” might seem to demand a solemn, stately tempo to evoke the arrival of a monarch bearing gifts and questions, but Warren-Green took the music from Act 3 of Solomon – a biblical oratorio that should be performed more often in full, like Handel’s Saul, Joshua, and Deborah – at a brisk pace that infused the occasion with merriment and excitement. I’ve heard performances that were even swifter, but the pace that Warren-Green chose allowed the interpolations of the twin winds to sound relatively reposeful. Any worry that the Queen would become unduly effeminate was silenced by the presence of flutist Erinn Frechette, who remained stolidly masked as she sat beside the oboists. The bustle of the strings, answering the oboes, was beautifully blithe and textured, the first violins securely on the left side of the YouTube sound image.

Under normal circumstances, we would have presumably seen the two clarinets onstage that Mozart added with his afterthoughts, but I wonder how many more Charlotte Symphony string players would have been deployed. The balance between the winds and the strings was noticeably tilted toward the upstage winds, particularly in the slow Andante movement that follows the familiar Molto allegro that engraves this masterwork in our memories. Throbbing just a little more prominently in the background, the bassoons and French horns supplied the forlorn music with its pulse. In the Menuetto, where martial urgency battled against leisurely elegance in triple meter, Frechette joined with the oboes for the final bars in delivering the unexpected victory to elegance. Far from distressing me, these new emphases consistently brought delight.

Again, I needed the YouTube stream in the finely judged Molto allegro to fully perceive the separation between the sections and fully appreciate the silkiness of the strings where they needed to glide – and their crispness each time they needed to make a point. Midway through this opening movement, the orchestra masterfully executed the intricate quasi-fugal layering of Mozart’s main theme as various sections juggled it and took turns seizing our attention. Frechette and Ulaky were the most eloquent voices in the beguiling dialogue between strings and winds in the Andante, where Warren-Green built the lurking turbulence to the brink of an outcry, granting it the power of insistence before the delicacy and transparency of the strings reclaimed dominance.

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In his personable introductory remarks, resident conductor Christopher James Lees earmarked the Menuetto rather than the outer movements as the spot where Mozart anticipated the glories of Beethoven, still a teenager when the “Great G Minor Symphony” was written in 1788 – but it didn’t sound as if Warren-Green and his ensemble had gotten the memo. Maybe more strings would have helped Lees’ words to ring more true, for the battle waged in this movement for rhythmic supremacy remained effective without bursting Mozart’s parlor.

The concluding Allegro assai was where restraint was most emphatically tossed aside, clearing the path for turbulence to occasionally prevail. While principals from the violin and cello sections weren’t in their customary chairs, musicians who moved up in rank to replace them and their absent peers breezed through the busiest passages of this symphony with the same poise as they had shown in less finger-busting episodes. Tempos charged ahead with thrilling momentum. Here the flute was more consonant with the strings, allowing the oboes and bassoons playing against the grain to stand out prominently.

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Camera work from four different locations was as capable as the sound engineering, especially perceptive when the French horns, principal Byron Johns and Andrew Fierova, drew the spotlight. This 45-minute concert continues streaming through May 1, a tantalizing foretaste of that delicious moment when a real audience will reward Symphony with the real applause it so richly deserves. Mark your calendar for May 14 if you wish to be in the room where it happens, when Branford Marsalis will join the orchestra to play Jacques Ibert’s Concertino da camera.

Dvořák’s New World Picks Up Slack in Symphony Concert

Review: Charlotte Symphony’s Dvořák’s New World Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

2019~Dvořák’s New World-5

Sometimes orchestras program pieces to meet popular demand, and at other times, they program works to meet expectations or fulfill a sense of obligation. It’s so easy to yield to inertia! This past weekend’s Charlotte Symphony concerts balanced both types of choices. Dvořák’s New World Symphony is so popular in the Queen City that an extra row of seats was set up at Belk Theater behind the already-packed Grand Tier.

Before subscribers could be appeased with the New World they were waiting for, we had to withstand lackluster performances by the CSO and guest conductor Ilyich Rivas of Robert Schumann’s “Overture to Manfred” and Johannes Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Neither performance convinced me that Symphony musicians were familiar with the music or took much pleasure in playing it. I was unsure myself whether I had ever heard these pieces before at the Belk.

My files confirmed how consistently forgettable the ensemble had been tackling this repertoire. CSO had last played the Schumann at the Belk in 2001, when I declared that the orchestra had fallen far short of the composer’s Byronic ambitions. Each of the two occasions since then, when Symphony had played the Haydn Variations in 2002 and 2010, I had found that the results were similarly moribund. Outcomes were perhaps marginally better last Friday night, though it’s still uncertain whether our musicians are completely sold on either of these works.

Wouldn’t it be better for everybody if Symphony put fresh new or unfamiliar scores on their players’ music stands – instead of repeatedly exhuming stuff like this so unenthusiastically?

While Amy Orsinger Whitehead ably headed the flutes and the brass accented well, violins seemed sloppy and lackadaisical in the Manfred, their exchanges with the brass and winds more precise than those with the lower strings. Rivas probably sparked more energy and cohesion than in the performance of the Variations led by Christof Perick in 2010, which observed pauses between variations.

But there still wasn’t enough zest – or dramatic contrast – to assure us that everyone was relishing their part, and there was little of the exquisite delicacy we have come to expect in softer, slower movements since Christopher Warren-Green took over the musical director’s baton. A limpid calm prevailed in successive reposeful Con moto movements that descended into lifelessness before a Vivace revival, and even the Finale, an Andante that can be grander than grand, grew slightly slack though it was still strong.

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Indicative of the éclat they created the last time they performed Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” Warren-Green and the CSO waited only four-and-a-half years to reprise their triumph – and with Rivas on the podium, the orchestra satisfied its subscribers just as fully. The magical mojo of 2015 wasn’t quite replicated, but then again, my expectations could no longer be taken so completely by surprise.

And to be truthful, Symphony didn’t get off to a great start this time, the French horns not as solid as the lordly trombones when we moved from the Adagio section of the opening movement to the sweeping Allegro molto. But the horns didn’t take long to steady and the flutes, Orsinger and Erinn Frechette, were superb; and gosh, the sforzando at the end of the movement had a fierce snap.

Four years ago, Warren-Green took the trouble to wade into the orchestra after its New World performance and embrace English horn principal Terry Maskin for his playing of the “Goin’ Home” theme in Dvořák’s lovely Largo movement. Rivas would not have been faulted if he had done the same. The flutes had a sunshiney glint in their frolics, the soft violins wove mystical enchantment, and the brasses and horns added dignity each time they were cued.

Dvořák’s crowning achievement fittingly premiered in the New World at Carnegie Hall in 1893, and the third movement Molto vivace, inspired by Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, has always seemed the most prophetic to me, spawning the film scores of multitudes of Westerns yet to be shot in our rugged plains, canyons, and badlands. All went well here until the ending became too disjointed for comfort.

Rivas regained – and then retained – his mastery in the awesome Allegro con fuoco, where the Old World can be felt birthing the New World and our fearsome Manifest Destiny marches westward, arrogant and irresistible. (“Get over it!” professed patriots might respond.) The Venezuelan-born conductor beautifully navigated the protean moods, and the orchestra keenly grasped the moment. In the wake of the heraldic brass, the violins burst forth with a vigor that had been missing earlier in the evening, adding new summits of grandeur. When the music grew soft, the woodwinds, especially the flutes, sweetened it; each time the brass and strings rallied, Ariel Zaviezo and his timpani triggered the uprising.

First Night at the Knight Succeeds With Rodrigo Concerto

Review: Rodrigo Guitar Concerto

By Perry Tannenbaum

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Christopher Warren-Green has done some new and innovative things since becoming the musical director at Charlotte Symphony: KnightSounds concerts aimed at young professionals, Thursday evening concerts, and live outdoor video broadcasts. But last week’s Rodrigo Guitar Concerto, the first Classics Series concert ever at Knight Theater, was unique, for Warren-Green himself wasn’t there to launch the new venture.

Not to worry, his stand-ins were sensational in their Charlotte debuts. First, there was guest conductor Marcelo Lehninger, who brought with him an engaging program of Latin-flavored pieces written between 1913 and 2003 by five different composers, most of them new to Symphony and to its subscribers.

How many pieces they played is actually open to dispute. There were two different Astor Piazzola selections, “Oblivion” and “Spring” (from Four Seasons in Buenos Aires), but pieces by Alberto Ginastera and Gabriela Lena Frank might be called single multiples. Frank’s 2003 suite was Three Latin-American Dances, each with its own title, and Ginastera’s Four Dances were no less individualized, excerpted from his 1941 Estancia ballet score.

Even the opening piece, Manuel De Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat Suite No. 1, was brimming with titles, four of them. The first, “Introduction – Afternoon,” was bold, brash, and filled with sunny fiesta exuberance, but everyone’s adrenalin onstage was flowing too freely, for the volume level was a little too fierce for the house. One wonders whether the orchestra had rehearsed without the acoustic shell that now surrounded them, since the brass especially needed taming.

While Symphony adjusted to the hall, Classics subscribers habituated to Belk Theater were also acclimating themselves to the greater immediacy of the orchestra sound at the Knight. There were also quieter episodes after the opening trumpet and timpani cannonade where we heard the clarinet, French horn, and oboe carving out space for themselves – even a rare bassoon spot – so the orchestra’s principals could recalibrate how loudly they played. Already the evening promised to be very colorful, with flute, harp, and a muted trumpet joining the symposium before “The Grapes” steered us back to jubilation.

Despite his Madrid concert with Plácido Domingo in front of 85,000 people, I had never heard of Pablo Sáinz Villegas before he strode into Knight Theater for his first Charlotte performance. Unlike the better-known Sharon Isbin, who played Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez at Belk Theater in 2009, Villegas didn’t bring any amplification with him.

He didn’t need it. Villegas quickly proved his virtuosity and charisma in the opening Allegro con spirito movement of the Concierto. Almost as quickly, the sound of his guitar became the preeminent reason why the Knight was such a brilliant choice for this music. Warren-Green should have been there, if only to hear his choice vindicated. He might also have joined with the audience in giving Villegas an unusual ovation at the end of the first movement. The strumming and the Spanish tinge that Villegas poured so plentifully into his playing seemed to infuse the strings with a special transparency when they entered.

But of course an Aranjuez must be judged by how well the soloist plays the familiar middle movement Adagio. The score has such sublimity to begin with that a critic finds it difficult to remember his pen, and Villegas treated this Adagio with no less reverence. Where the solo part touches the stratosphere with high harmonics, Villegas was exquisite, and where the long cadenza later on goes low, he caressed it with a fervid vibrato and a soft touch, providing a long runway to ramp up his intensity. Lehninger and Charlotte Symphony didn’t spoil the magic. Terry Maskin played the English horn’s runs at the melody as beautifully as ever, the ensemble’s answer to the mighty cadenza was never rushed, and the flurry of harmonics from Villegas at the end was the best I’ve ever heard.

Instead of a standing, stomping ovation, the audience maintained a rapt, stunned silence. Two or three people actually walked out, possibly because that music alone was what they had come to hear, or possibly because they didn’t wish to sully their ears with anything that might erase the deep impression lingering there. Not even Rodrigo’s next movement.

Fortunately, Villegas didn’t get the wrong impression himself, for he played the final Allegro gentile as if he were already celebrating a triumph, not the slightest restraint remaining in his strumming. The previously withheld ovation burst forth with equal joy that clearly touched the young guitarist, even if it didn’t surprise him. The first encore he delivered, “Gran Jota de concierto” by Francisco Tárrega, sported tuned percussive effects delivered by hitting the body of his instrument with an open right hand while playing the neck with his left. Another section sounded so dry that it was like hearing the tattoo of a snare drum. Impossible for us to let him go after that display.

So Villegas finished with Tárrega’s melancholy classic, “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” returning us to Spain for his farewell. The beauty of it is the melody and the tremolo rolling together in wistful waves. Villegas kept the two strands separate and soulful, so it never sounded the least bit like an etude.

If the two encores kept the concert from ending at 9pm as promised in the program booklet, intermission added further delay, for Villegas was out in the Knight lobby signing his CD, and an unusually hefty line formed for the privilege.

Before the lollipops of Piazzolla and the beefier Ginastera, the little suite by Frank assuaged anxieties that 21st century composers are all about chaotic cacophony. Many Americans have now awakened to contemporary works emanating from Europe, Asia, and South America and realized that they are out of step.

After a deluge of mallet percussion, Frank used the violins to build a bridge to tonality in “Jungle Jaunt,” the first of her three dances. “Highland Harawi” was more tranquil in its percussion, most unique for the unusual instrument that Lehninger thoughtfully introduced us to, percussion tubes that produced gentle sounds of rain. Tubular bells, woodblocks, harp, and voodoo piano runs were part of the mystery. As if reaching a clearing, “The Mestizo Waltz” began with the kind of trumpet heraldry that conjured up Mexico and mariachi before settling into 3/4 time as promised.

Uncharacteristically, concertmaster Calin Lupanu began the evening with a paean to live music, confiding in us that nearly all recorded music is fake, edited and doctored by sound engineers before it’s reproduced on the medium and player of your choice. Lupanu’s frank intro, the new venue, and the preponderance of unfamiliar music were all symptoms of a basic urge to break some of the old rules. So nobody seemed to mind the breach of etiquette when the audience applauded Villegas two movements early.

It was all good, exciting, youthful and fresh, without the slightest hint of dumbing down or condescension. The exhilaration in the lobby at intermission carried over to the end of the concert, because new discoveries kept coming.

 

Warren-Green Pays off Bronco Bet After Rousing All-Russian Concert

By Perry Tannenbaum

Calin Lupanu plays Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto this week with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.

March 17, 2016, Charlotte, NC – For the first time in nearly two years, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra presented an all-Russian concert. These two programs were elegantly linked by the appearance of CSO concertmaster Calin Lupanu playing one of Sergei Prokofiev’s two violin concertos on each occasion. Or that was the intent, because after conducting Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3, music director Christopher Warren-Green was obliged to pay off a wager he had made in early February, prior to his previous appearance in the orchestra’s classics series. That was the weekend of the Super Bowl, when the Carolina Panthers squared off against the Denver Broncos. Well, since both orchestras are led by Christophers and abbreviate themselves as the CSO, it was natural that the friendly municipal pre-game wagering would not be limited to our mayors. Amid an online exchange of jovial slurs and vaunts, Warren-Green declared that, if the Panthers lost, he would conduct the Broncos’ theme song, Copland’s “Rodeo,” wearing Bronco quarterback Peyton Manning’s iconic No. 18 jersey. Keeping his word, Warren-Green capped an evening that began by intoning the Satanic revels of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” with the sunshine and mirth of the quintessential American composer’s ballet music.

Warren-Green’s prime objective with Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s macabre classic was very much like it was in 2009, when he conducted the piece as part of his audition for the music directorship. Then and now it was quite obvious that Warren-Green felt that the concluding calm of the piece, beginning with the churchly tolling of the tubular bells, was normally undervalued. Fortunately, the orchestra took a more dynamic path this time around than they did seven years ago, when they drained the tone poem’s familiar opening of all its wonder and terror. Now instead of smoothing it over, Warren-Green was exaggerating the contrast, speeding up the tempo of the rampaging strings and calling forth more volume and sforzando snap from the brass and percussion. The effect veered way too far from Bela Lugosi toward video game, but the onset of the bells was far more miraculous this time around. Accompanied by Andrea Mumm’s harp, the violins suddenly sounded mournful and exhausted after the wild Witches’ Sabbath, eventually modulating toward calm and restoration after poignant solos by clarinetist Drucilla DeVan and principal flutist Amy Orsinger.

You could hardly ask for a sweeter opening than Lupanu’s for the Prokofiev Violin Concert No. 2 – even from the justly lauded Maxim Vengerov recording with Rostropovich and the London Symphony. But I wanted more muscle as the tempo speeded up. We occasionally lost the soloist’s line behind the French horns, but the sinew of Lupanu’s playing emerged in the Allegro moderato when the lower string sections moved into the background, very persuasive in the higher passages. Although it couldn’t be confused with Philip Glass’s work, there is intensive repetitiveness at various points of the soloist’s part in Prokofiev’s outer movements, which may explain why Lupanu felt compelled to bring the score with him onto the Belk Theater stage.

Subscribers who are persnickety about such things, expecting their guest artists to memorize their pieces, were probably more pacified by Lupanu’s soulful performance of the Andante assai inner movement. After the stealthy intro from the woodwinds, gently weighted toward the clarinets, Lupanu’s lyricism excelled again in the upper regions. Over a leisurely 3/4 accompaniment, the music swelled to anthemic strength with Lupanu gliding and somersaulting above. Muted trumpets then pulsated, quickening the pace as the soloist broke into a gallop. When the accompaniment resumed its previous repose, Lupanu wove some high filigree and pizzicato work into the fadeout. The jauntiness of the 3/4 tempo was most pronounced in the closing Allegro ben marcato, punctuated by a snare drum, a set of maracas, and the brass pumping a merry oompah behind Lupanu’s lusty fiddling. There was a final burst of intensive churning where Lupanu snuck a glance or two at the score, but he ended admirably with a virtuosic flourish at a blistering tempo.

The CSO program booklet is utterly confused about the orchestra’s only previous performance of the Rachmaninoff A-minor symphony, for the 2009 date ascribed to guest conductor Leslie Dunner was actually the date of Warren-Green’s aforementioned audition with its woeful “Bald Mountain.” No, it was during the twilight of the Clinton Administration, January 1999, when I greeted the only previous performance of Rachmaninoff No. 3 as “turgid, clichéd movie music, grandly entertaining and flamboyantly superficial.” But the allusion to Warren-Green’s is curiously apt because once again, the CSO maestro has improved upon a previous CSO flop.

Where Dunner stumbled in his attempts to “civilize and homogenize” Rachmaninoff’s abrupt shifts of mood and tempo, Warren-Green succeeded brilliantly, rehabbing the music as effectively as my Mariss Jansons recording with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Again the middle Adagio-Allegro movement stood out as when Dunner performed it, with principal French hornist Frank Portone ably caressing the forlorn intro once more. This time, with Lupanu sitting out the second half of the concert, it was Joseph Meyer in the concertmaster’s chair following up so beautifully on the violin. Not only did Warren-Green navigate the rollercoaster shifts of the outer movements more convincingly, he also held the inner logic of the middle movement together more securely. When we circled back to the solos by Portone and Meyer, there was a satisfying sense of an epic circle being completed, crowned by more tasty solo work by Terry Maskin on the English horn and Eugene Kavadlo on the clarinet.

© 2016 CVNC