The California Symphony balanced its concert on Saturday, March 22, at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts with a new work, an unusual concerto, and a favorite final symphony by one of the old masters.
Artistic and Music Director Donato Cabrera, speaking before leading Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”), reprimanded those conductors who try to preempt applause after the piece’s triumphant third movement by diving immediately into the tragic finale. It doesn’t work, he said, the inevitable clapping from part of the audience (and shushing from the rest) only drowning out the finale’s beautiful opening.
No surprise, then, that all four of the symphony’s movements were deservingly applauded on Saturday. Cabrera waited patiently for the last bit of sound from the audience to die away before raising his baton to begin the finale.
In his spoken remarks, Cabrera also suggested that this movement, marked Adagio lamentoso, is bitter, not resigned, and reflects the composer’s inability to live openly as a gay man. Cabrera’s musical interpretation here placed heroic emphasis on the fortissimo exclamations in the otherwise mostly quiet scoring, making for a searingly memorable conclusion.
In the symphony’s opening movement, pellucid instrumental lines passed each other like dancers elegantly executing chasing steps. Section breaks were marked off by long pauses and sharply defined changes of tempo and mood. The gentle 5/4 waltz of the second movement was set off by a smoothly rocking rhythm in the subsidiary theme. The lively third-movement march began cool in temper, building to a roaring climax only near the end.
Cabrera made no attempt to reconcile the contrasts between movements or to interpret them in light of each other. I have heard the “Pathétique” performed with the inner movements working in vigorous rebuttal of the outer melancholia, or in oblivious denial of their surroundings, or sometimes even sounding as darkly foreboding and ominous as the rest of work. This version was none of the above. Instead, Cabrera presented the symphony as if it were a suite of four separate tone poems. The music was crisply delineated throughout, and the orchestra played with transparent clarity. It was an outstandingly bright and direct performance.
Before intermission came the Piano Concerto by Grażyna Bacewicz, the mid-20th-century Polish composer whose works have been emerging lately in performance. This 1949 piece has recently been unearthed thanks in part to the efforts of Saturday’s soloist, David Fung.
You could easily mistake the music for a lost Sergei Prokofiev concerto, particularly in Fung’s propulsive rendition. The solo part is full of characteristic Prokofiev-like figures: simple chordal melodies, crisp runs followed by sudden pounding on the keyboard, brief high-tension climaxes — all executed with precision and vigor here.
The accompaniment is similar while exhibiting Bacewicz’s distinctive approach to orchestration. The composer balances ensemble and soloist nicely, never letting the music get too clotted or grandiose. Under Cabrera, the orchestra had its finest moments at the beginning of the slow movement, where darkly shimmering strings combine with ominous sounds from the winds, and in the finale, which features a prominent role for percussion.
Fung reinforced his firm, snappy approach in his encores, playing Franz Schubert’s gentle Moment Musical No. 3 with a jumpy percussive attack and following this with Moritz Moszkowski’s busy and lively showpiece “Étincelles” (as popularized by Vladimir Horowitz).
The concert’s world-premiere work was Fantasia for Strings by California Symphony composer-in-residence Saad Haddad. Haddad has concocted an homage to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis that doesn’t copy the original precisely, but the constant resemblance is inescapable.
As in Vaughan Williams, there’s a concertino ensemble, here a string quartet seated at the back of the stage. While the larger string orchestra played a pastiche in conventional Western harmony, the concertino set up a dissonant contrast by introducing the same material in the Arabic maqam system of melodic modes. Occasional drones sounding like fire alarms enlivened the texture.
Haddad’s idea is that as listeners’ ears gets used to the harmonic contrast, they will come to experience the two styles as one. It worked — sort of. The spirit of the pastiche compositions of Luciano Berio hovered over this music. But Haddad’s Fantasia was interesting and effectively performed, offering a welcome glimpse into other ways of music-making.
