Piccolo hits high point in low notes
The dirty little secret about writing a concerto for piccolo and orchestra is that the whole enterprise is so unusual that a composer could easily coast through on novelty alone. But Martin Rokeach didn’t fall for that one.
The composer’s new Piccolo Concerto, which got a wonderfully ingratiating world premiere on Friday night, doesn’t spend any time asking the audience to marvel at the sheer spectacle of the enterprise. In three movements running about 20 minutes, Rokeach assembles a wealth of melodic material and dramatic dialogue that, in essence, might not have been
out of place transferred to a different instrument.
But at the same time, this is unmistakably a work written with its specific circumstances in mind. Rokeach revels in the particular sonorities of the piccolo — particularly its sweet- toned, rather vulnerable low register, which is worlds away from the piercing shrillness with which it usually blasts its way through an orchestral texture. And he lavishes the solo part with care and solicitude.
He just doesn’t ask the piccolo to dance like a clown for your amusement. It’s a perfect balance to strike.
Rokeach’s concerto was the centerpiece of Friday’s concert by the Oakland Symphony under Music Director Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theatre. It featured a dazzling solo turn by Amy Likar, who sounded entirely in sympathy with the work’s fundamental premises.
In particular, Likar was clearly intent on bringing out the more expressive vein in Rokeach’s writing, and outlining a dramatic relationship between soloist and orchestra that was not quite antagonistic — in the manner of traditional Classical and Romantic concertos — and yet not quite collaborative either.
The work’s formal outline is conventional enough, with an expository first movement, a lyrical — one could almost say sentimental — slow movement, and a brisk finale that alludes to the piccolo’s martial background. But within that framework you can hear Rokeach trying out a variety of inventive strategies, including the soloist’s exhortations to the orchestra in the first movement, and the odd — yet oddly persuasive — stop- and- start phrases in the finale.
And in the longbreathed melodies of the slow movement, which Likar delivered with winning tonal beauty and eloquence, you can hear a new kind of character being forged for the piccolo. It’s the kind of thing that instrumentalists all over might undertake.
The first half of the program was less successful, as the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Lynne Morrow, struggled to breathe life into Cherubini’s Requiem in C Minor. This is a piece known more by reputation than through actual performance, and it needed more polish and tonal luster to make its case. Beethoven’s Second Symphony, in a bluff, nicely vigorous rendition, brought the program to a more telling conclusion.