Concert features Eastern European music
Eastern Europe was the location featured on the New Mexico Philharmonic’s Classic concert last Saturday. Conductor Andrew Grams led the music of Enescu (Romania), Bartók (Hungary) and Tchaikovsky (Russia) with guest violinist Fumiaki Miura.
George Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 is by and large his only work still played, and that is a shame because as his nation’s primary composer, he wrote much worthy and enjoyable music. The first of two, this Rhapsody employs several native folk songs and dances, including Little Bud and The Lark (Ciocirilio).
It opened with a duet between clarinet (Lori Lovato) and oboe (Melissa Peña) with later solos by viola (Christine Rancier), flute (Valerie Potter) and piccolo (Sara Tutland). The running string figures can’t help but get the blood pumping through the veins. My toes were certainly tapping.
Last season with the Philharmonic young violinist Miura was most impressive in the Lalo Symphony espagnole for violin and orchestra. He returned to Popejoy this time playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. With technique to spare Miura’s tone was bright even brilliant against the background of Tchaikovsky’s opulent orchestration.
This concerto was once considered unplayable. Its formidable and then-novel difficulties are now part of repertory technique. Indeed, Miura played the work with a fluency and grace of character. The middle movement Canzonetta was wistful but never awash in melancholy to which Tchaikovsky was frequently prone. The rapid fire impetuosity of the final Allegro vivacissimo which bordered on the drive of a rock band, was likely the very quality late 19th century audiences objected to, and which thrills today’s listeners.
Following a standing ovation Miura played variations on “Yankee Doodle” (Souvenirs d’Amérique by Vieuxtemps) as encore with some honeyed harmonics which became the concert equivalent of a grand slam.
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is just that a showpiece for the entire orchestra, and a large orchestra at that. The work is often described as “accessible” (as if inaccessible music is to be taken seriously!), yet it represents all the more vital and intelligent tendencies of the 20th century.
By far the most notable of its genre, the Concerto provides an excellent showcase for the individual talents of an orchestra and in the Philharmonic there are many. The scherzo featured a succession of pairs of instruments, bassoons, oboes, clarinets and muted trumpets playing parallel in various intervals.
Grams gave the impressionistic Elegia an austere refinement. The Intermezzo, initially of a folk character, is rudely interrupted by a deliberate allusion to Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, the march of which Bartók considered a particular banality. He derides it with instrumental jeers. Though Bartók himself wasn’t above a bit of orchestral wheelspinning now and again, even in this work.
The brilliant finale is initiated by tune in the horns that later becomes the subject of a fugue before its triumphant dénouement by the full brass section. There were furious running passages for the strings similar to those in the Enescu and stemming from the same folk tradition.