Works by 3 composers bring audience to feet

A world premiere, a worldclass soloist and one of the wildest symphonies the world has ever known blew the roof off the Ohio Theatre Friday night when Rossen Milanov led the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Jennifer Koh in works by Andreia PintoCorreia, Sibelius and Berlioz.

Commissioned by and dedicated to the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, PintoCorreia’s Cipres, inspired by poetry of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, was a radiant wash of color. The violins began with only the faintest thread of sound, growing almost imperceptibly. Out of this came a depiction of static water; eerie, towering cypresses; then poplars, then willows, emerging in bristling dissonances.

Jennifer Koh dazzled in the Sibelius Violin Concerto. In the concerto’s fist movement, Koh’s first cadenza was clean and evenly paced, and she paced her phrases at the recapitulation with near surgical precision.

From the jaunty opening chords of the finale, the musicians sustained an understated intensity from peak to peak. The performance brought a standing ovation, which brought Koh back for a gorgeous encore performance of the Prelude of Bach’s Solo Violin Partita in D minor.

The introduction of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was an evocatively hushed dreamscape that opened onto a fever-pulsed performance of the symphony’s idee fixe.

Milanov took an airy tempo in the second movement, A Ball, where the overall effect was one of whirling around a glittering funhouse ballroom.

The ranz des vaches between English horn and oboe at the beginning of the third movement, In the Country, was beautifully and bucolically played. A lovely clarinet solo graced the movement’s middle, and nuanced English horn playing and a final thought whispered in the strings closed the movement.

The fourth movement, March to the Scaffold, was raunchy in all the right ways, each musician seeming to delight in Berlioz’s orchestrational oddities – screeching bassoon parts, overwrought pizzicati, brass writing with a swagger that can only be called goofy.

The finale, Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath, was delightfully smelly, with a clarinet solo so remarkably grotesque it could have made Morticia Addams blush, wake the dead. The performance garnered the concert’s second standing ovation.

The next performance is at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Ohio Theatre.