Eroica performance like a runaway train

Exhilarating interpretations play to E. European mystery

Eastern European composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries drew liberally from the folk music of their regions.

Romania, Hungary, the Bohemian realm of the Czech Republic: In these places, the music often takes unexpected and dark turns. If the melodies sometimes perpetuate the myth of the gypsy caravan or the vampire’s lair, so be it. Listen, and let the imagination run wild.

On Saturday night, the Eroica Ensemble indulged the audience in darker airs at First Congregational Church. Two things that Michael Gilbert’s handpicked orchestra does exceptionally well in this booming church sanctuary are intensity and volume.

There was no shortage of either in Gilbert’s direction of George Enescu’s exciting “Rumanian Rhapsody” No. 1 in A major. The Romanian composer once called it a collection of tunes he’d heard. But its unexpected twists, turns and leaps also make it an exhilarating work more than a century later. Like a train with no brakes flying through the Carpathian Mountains, Gilbert drove his orchestra to ever-higher ranges. Flutist Todd Skitch and violist Anthony Gilbert added great scenery to the ride.

Some may remember soloist Saeka Matsuyama-archibald from her November 2010 performance with the Eroica Ensemble, when she offered an exceptional performance of Sibelius’ “Violin Concerto in D minor.”

Her playing in Dvorak’s “Violin Concerto in A minor” on Saturday was equally clean and crisp. Her technique is so solid and grounded that only a real-life Bohemian might complain that it lacked a certain free - spiritedness. Still, Matsuyama-archibald is a precision player with a clean-as-razor bow stroke. Her refinement is remarkable.

Gilbert ventured west for the closing symphony on the program. Cesar Franck may not have mingled with gypsies, but he was an organist, and as Gilbert giddily pointed out, organists have a natural flair for the dramatic.

The first movement of the “Symphony in D Minor” has all the tension of a suspense thriller or a gothic romance. (You can hear strains of it in the Billy Wilder film “Double Indemnity.”) The deep, reverberant thunder of the basses were constantly effective, as was Nathan Nix’s oboe passages in the second movement. Under concertmaster Yoko Takebe, Franck’s fast violin passages were played with distinctive clarity.

Subtlety deferred to panache in this Eroica performance, but with these three dramatic works, that wasn’t a problem at all.