Mickelthwate leads OKC Phil in bold Classics 6 concert
On Saturday, Alexander Mickelthwate, music director designate, led the Oklahoma City Philharmonic in yet another delightful and surprising concert, this time featuring boldly innovative works spanning two centuries, embodying the spirits of the French Revolution and the Digital Revolution.
Maestro Mickelthwate opened the concert with composer and DJ Mason Bates’ “Mothership,” a fresh change of pace, considering the orchestra’s tendency to restrict its repertoire to canonized classics. Backed by club-thumping, electroacoustic techno groove, the novel work challenged the common stereotype of contemporary music as inaccessible or avantgarde.
Originally composed for the YouTube Symphony, “Mothership” is structured as an orchestral scherzo, cleverly using idioms of modern electronic dance music in place of traditional 18th-century dance forms. The exuberant performance was full of sci-fi-inspired whimsy; zany soloistic episodes, including an amusing, drunkenly smarmy E-flat clarinet solo performed by James Meiler that brought to mind characters that could have stumbled out of the “Star Wars” cantina. Programming this unabashedly fun, contemporary opener was a smart move toward a more modern and relevant repertory, exploring new styles without alienating (pardon the pun) more traditional patrons.
Guest soloist Joyce Yang closed the first half with a delicate and dexterous performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Pianistically virtuosic works in this vein almost come with an expectation of bombast and bravura; Yang marvelously betrayed such expectations with a confidently understated interpretation, coaxing the sound, rather than banging it into submission. Daring to draw the audience into her dynamic level, her softs were truly and surprisingly intimate. Yang’s judicious pedaling was bravely sparse, exposing a surgically clean technique.
Velocity and clarity aside, she also generously in a tender rendition of the singingly sublime “18th Variation,” when Rachmaninoff ingeniously inverts the theme in the major mode. Ironically, this variant of “Paganini” is possibly the most characteristically Rachmaninoffian melody the man ever wrote.
Yang treated us to an encore performance of an arrangement of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” introduced as her “favorite piece to perform.” Although an odd and perhaps anti-climactic choice on the heels of “Paganini,” Yang gave a heartfelt and emotive performance of a beautiful jazz classic.
Mickelthwate concluded the concert with Beethoven’s monumental “Eroica Symphony No. 3.” As bold and incendiary as the man whose dedication is so violently scribbled off the manuscript, the nearly hourlong symphony is perhaps the most profoundly revolutionary of Beethoven’s symphonies. Announcing the work as singularly inspirational in his own formation as a conductor, Mickelthwaite clearly shares a deeply intimate connection with this symphony. He navigated this musical marathon beautifully, striking a balance between structural integrity and expressive liberty. His phrasing was clear and directional with a natural tide of ebb and flow, surging forward with militant fervor, then languishing in introspection.
The orchestra sounded excellent; not only didit play expressively and responsively, it did so cleanly, in tune and in time — and on an unforgivingly transparent piece that the audience knows inside and out. Specifically, the horn section shined in what was easilyitsbest performance of the season; the famously subversive repeated chords in the first movement — you know the ones — were glorious.
The concert was a success, boding well for the future of the orchestra. Mickelthwate will return to the podium on April 7 for the seventh installment of the Classics series, featuring Prokofiev’s “Suite from Romeo and Juliet.”