Honeck returns to form in a PSO digital concert
With a dramatic entrance, Manfred Honeck returned to the podium at Heinz Hall after over a year away.
The concert streamed Saturday and available through Friday on the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s digital platform, psofrontrow.org, was the most traditional look of the PSO’s pandemic video offerings so far.
Previous concerts came with stark lighting in an otherwise darkened hall or placed the performers in outdoor settings across Western Pennsylvania. This one was as close to “normal” as is possible until indoor venue capacity and other
COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. That means brass and woodwinds are out and strings are in, for now.
Honeck returned to the maestro’s podium little diminished. From his steady hand in the opening and closing passages of Walker’s “Lyric for Strings” to picking out the quick dynamic notes climbing the scale in Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” it was a welcome return to form.
Longtime PSO patrons will get a kick out of hearing principal cellist Anne Martindale Williams serve as musical guide for the concert,
offering historical context and personal tidbits about the selections, a way to bridge the digital distance between viewers and performers until the entire orchestra and audience can be together once more.
The first work, Mozart’s “Serenata notturna,” brought a solo quartet from the strings section to the forefront along with prominent timpani passages. The charming piece gave guest concertmaster David Kim, principal bassist Brandon McLean and principal violist Tatjana Mead Chamis a chance to shine.
Such pieces were often played at dinner parties, wedding receptions or other gatherings as background music.
Though Mozart wrote it in 1776, the quartet-only sections and a fun round robin from the soloists continue to entertain and amuse. Who knows what 18th-century revelers thought of the timpani solo?
George Walker’s wellknown “Lyric for Strings” followed, and one can only imagine what it must have been like to hear this moving performance in person. It becomes even more powerful when you learn it was written in memory of the Black composer’s grandmother.
An interlude from principal horn player William Caballero broke up the works for strings. He played “Interstellar Call” from Olivier Messiaen’s 1976 bicentennial work “From the Canyons to the Stars …,” a piece that attempts to capture the vastness of the heavens.
The final work of the evening was Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” a bold work that, as Williams noted, allows the players little rest. Chamis was a standout here in passages that allowed her to capture the emotional fullness of the adagio movement and end it with grace.
The high-energy performance of the last movement offered viewers a fulfilling conclusion to the concert, and wide camera shots teased viewers who long to take in a concert at Heinz Hall again soon.