Rarely heard symphony a hit in opener
In between the vigorous power of his Fourth Symphony and the martial ferocity of the Sixth, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony stands as an island of elegant, heartfelt repose. It’s a work of tender beauty, and to hear it performed live on Saturday, Sept. 18, as part of the California Symphony’s season-opening program was to wonder yet again why this score doesn’t play more of a role in our concert life.
Or any role at all, really — an admittedly less than rigorous search failed to uncover evidence of any local performance of Vaughan Williams’ Fifth over the past few decades.
Yet Music Director Donato Cabrera and the orchestra, in a welcome return to live performance at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, undertook this 1943 masterpiece as if it were a cornerstone of the repertoire. The performance, the first of two over the weekend, was expansive in scope and finely wrought in its details — just the sort of performance that can help re-situate a musical work in the public imagination.
A number of stylistic tributaries flow into this four-movement piece. One was the symphonic model of Sibelius, who was already well into the decades of creative silence that attended the latter part of his life. Vaughan Williams dedicated the piece to him, and there are instrumental textures and harmonic strategies throughout that bring the older composer to mind.
The California Symphony is the first local orchestra out of the gate with a fall season.
Another was Vaughan Williams’ long work on an operatic version of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which fed thematic material into the Fifth Symphony. Yet a third was the musical language of the English Renaissance.
All these strains blend in fascinating, sometimes unique ways into a score that gleams with an old-fashioned inner light. The melodies, based on centuriesold musical modes, sound simultaneously urgent and comfortably worn in; even in the more vivacious writing of the scherzo, there is something serene about the proceedings.
Cabrera and the orchestra evoked all those qualities in a performance of vividness and grace. The harmonic tug of the opening movement — with the strings seemingly in one key and the horns in another — was resolved with eloquent patience, and the two-againstthree rhythms of the sprightly scherzo kicked up a winning ruckus.
Most alluring, perhaps, was the broad slow movement, adorned by a piquant duet for oboe and English horn and a short but vibrant solo from concertmaster Jennifer Cho. When the finale faded out into a luminous stillness, there was a notable hush across the entire hall.
Cabrera led off the program with the 1770 Sinfonia in C by Marianna Martines, a composition pupil of Haydn’s whose music, though skilled, doesn’t quite bear the weight of expectations imposed on it by the hope of finding an underexposed female composer from
this period. Pianist Adam Golka was the soloist in a solid but rather impassive account of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto that paled beside the exuberance of his encore, a finger-busting medley of stride piano.
The California Symphony is the first local orchestra out of the gate with a fall season, but others are coming close behind: the New Century Chamber Orchestra on Sept. 30, the San Francisco Symphony on Oct. 1, and the Santa Rosa Symphony and Symphony Silicon Valley on Oct. 2.
Nature, as they say, is healing, and not a moment too soon.