Berkeley Symphony launches a new era
How do you mark the beginning of a new chapter in the life of a musical organization? If you’re Joseph Young and the Berkeley Symphony, you do it with a telling mix of familiar material and new (or newish) work meant to establish some artistic priorities.
Young was appointed only a few months ago as the orchestra’s new music director, just the fourth in a nearly 50year history. And on Thursday, Oct. 24, at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, he lost no time in turning a spotlight on an important and undervalued figure in the city’s musical life.
That would be Olly Wilson, the composer and UC Berkeley professor who died last year at 80. Wilson’s music was steeped in African and jazz traditions as well as the strains of European art music, and “Shango Memory,” a short but
richly atmospheric curtainraiser from 1995 that opened the program, exemplified that combination.
Taking its inspiration from the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning, the piece unfolds under a glowering canopy of dark strings and lumbering brass. The percussion comes to the fore repeatedly, first as a sort of ominous textural counterpoint and later, when the clouds give way to an invigorating dancelike melody, as the bearers of rhythmic vitality.
This is music that is inventive and straightforward in its creative strategies, and Young and the orchestra delivered it with vigorous clarity. And for Young to begin his tenure with the work of an African American composer — still all too rare an event on this or any orchestral stage — was in itself a potent political statement.
More conventional fare came in the form of Ravel’s GMajor Piano Concerto, with Conrad Tao as the lightfingered soloist, and after intermission, a swift and thoughtful account of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Both of them suggested that Young and the orchestra have some work ahead of them in finding one another’s expressive rhythms — this is a collaborative relationship still in its early stages — but both gave promise of good things ahead.
The Ravel benefited from Tao’s exuberantly vivid artistry, vivacious and crisp in the brisk outer movements and tender in the spunout writing of the central slow movement. His encore, a beautifully rendered arrangement of the opening sonatina from Bach’s cantata “Actus Tragicus” as arranged by György Kurtág, was a memorial tribute to Márta Kurtág, the composer’s wife and duopiano partner.
For the Beethoven, Young adopted an approach that was swiftfooted and generous. Tempos in the first movement weren’t particularly fast, but Young’s decision to hustle straight through the music’s pauses gave it an intriguing sense of headlong impulsiveness.
And if the scherzo sounded a bit soggy, there was a glorious surge into the triumphal explosion of the finale — brass ablaze, strings churning energetically as the orchestra drove its way unstoppably to the symphony’s big finish. It was enough to leave a listener eager to experience the rest of this tale as it unfolds in the coming months and years.
Beginning with the work of an African American composer was a potent political statement.