TMF Orchestra shows its youth
Festival gives young musicians a career boost with four-week program and helps fill Houston’s summer calendar.
The Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival is an important component of Houston’s arts scene. It gives its young, mostly collegeaged musicians a career boost with its four-week intensive training program and its multiple performance opportunities, and fills the performance vacuum left when most of Houston’s professional orchestras and classical ensembles go on hiatus for the summer.
This past Saturday night marked the second of four 2018 festival orchestra concerts at the University of Houston’s Moores Opera House. Here, the full orchestra, under the direction of guest conductor Horst Förster, evinced both the advantages and pitfalls that can characterize a young festival orchestra performance.
Titled “Heroic Statements,” the program comprised two works. In the first, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 featuring pianist Timothy Hester, the festival orchestra from the outset got the rich, warm, balanced Brahms orchestral sound right. But the performance was plagued with imprecision when it came to ensemble playing, the orchestra not ideally in synch with Hester.
Now, an orchestra of young musicians who are only together for four weeks can hardly be expected to play with the turn-on-a-dime precision of an ensemble of seasoned professionals who have been performing together for many years. Nonetheless, the festival orchestra often fell behind the soloist, and at times it felt like Förster was pulling his musicians along through the performance. Furthermore, the work was a bit sedate, needing more energy from the podium that it didn’t really get until the last, when everyone seemed to pull together for the sprightly fourth movement.
Fortunately for the appreciative audience filling the Moores Opera House, the evening took a turn for the better with the second work on the program, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, “Pathétique.”
The performance found both orchestra and maestro fully in sync and committed to mining Tchaikovsky’s score for every vibrant orchestral color for which the Russian composer is justly famous. Each instrumental section made the most of its opportunities to shine, the well-balanced strings, in particular, developing the famous melody of the first movement with lush sound, culminating in a recapitulation of sweeping grandeur.
Still, the “Pathétique” has a trap and Maestro Förster wasn’t able to avoid it, letting the subdued final movement seem anticlimactic. Consequently, the ebullient march figure that ends the preceding third movement felt like it should be the finale of the entire piece.
If the Tchaikovsky lacked ideal precision, it made up for it with youthful energy and colorful, impassioned playing. The former may elicit admiration, but the latter engenders emotion and whole-audience engagement. This “Pathétique,” on balance, was indeed engaging and made a compelling case for the singular performance qualities a young festival orchestra like this can summon.