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| Jon Gustely, horn. Photo courtesy of Louisville Orchestra. |
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| Michael Colvin, tenor. Photo courtesy Intermusica. |
Louisville Orchestra:
Glass, Britten, Bizet
Jorge Mester, conductor
Featuring Michael Colvin, tenor
and Jon Gustely, horn
Featuring Michael Colvin, tenor
and Jon Gustely, horn
Reviewed by Scott Dowd
Entire contents are
copyright © 2012 Scott Dowd. All rights reserved.
When
Jorge Mester returned six years ago as music director of the Louisville
Orchestra, he came armed with an artistic master plan. The plan included a conscious
effort to rely less on big-name, expensive soloists and feature members of the
ensemble more prominently than before. The maestro’s plan was evident in his
selections for this week’s classics concerts, which included the Symphony No. 3 of Philip Glass; Benjamin
Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and
Strings, Op. 31; and George Bizet’s Symphony
No. 1 in C Major. Thursday morning, I joined several hundred others at the
Brown Theatre for the Treyton Oaks Tower Coffee Classic performance.
The
concert opened with Glass’s Symphony No.
3. It is a unique work in the symphonic repertoire in that the piece is
scored for only strings, and not even the full string section at that. This is
a challenge in the Brown, which needs the power of numbers to overcome acoustical
idiosyncrasies. This left the performance lacking some of the brightness and
clarity usually expected from Glass. Minimalist music is deceptively intricate
and each instrument is, as Dr. Mosley mentions in his program notes,
essentially a soloist. As in cooking, when you do something simple it has to be done perfectly, and
there were some issues with balance and timing that marred the first movement.
By the second movement, the ensemble found its center of gravity that allowed
concertmaster Michael Davis’s solo to soar.
With
the performance of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade,
the maestro again achieves his previously stated goal of bringing individual
musicians to the fore. The extraordinarily accomplished principal horn Jon
Gustely was joined by Irish-Canadian tenor Michael Colvin in this performance.
Thursday’s performance realized another of the Mester’s goals in that the
70-year-old work had not yet been performed by the Louisville Orchestra.
Britten wrote the piece in 1943, and it was performed by Denis Brain and
the composer’s life-long companion Peter Pears originally. Both the Prologue
and Epilogue are set for solo horn and strings and demand technical
perfection – a fact that has long made this work a favorite for those wishing to
demonstrate their virtuosity. Gustely’s confidence was evident as he deftly
delivered his stunning and flawless interpretation of the music. Not to be
outdone, Colvin captured the audience from the first note of the Pastoral, in
which Britten set to music the beautiful words and ideas of Alfred Lord
Tennyson. Despite its seven decades, Britten’s canny juxtaposition of tenor and
horn and the color lent by his notation that the horn rely on its natural
overtones gives this piece a sense of modernity.
The
program concluded with the full orchestra in a performance of Bizet’s
long-forgotten Symphony in C Major.
Bizet, the child prodigy, had already been eight years at the Paris Conservatory
when he wrote the symphony in 1855. He was seventeen, and for reasons lost to
us seems never to have mentioned the work or attempted to publish it. The
piece was rediscovered in the conservatory’s archives nearly eighty years after
it was written. It is easily understood why for many years this work was
favored by students at the conservatory as a work to prepare conducting
students. The bones of this symphony are solid and mature, its orchestration
textbook perfection. It is in the adagio of the second movement that Bizet’s genius
for melody can be heard, as the oboes sing a phantasmal song. We can only hope
that interim principal Jennifer Potochnic and interim Alex Winter can be
retained as permanent members of the Louisville Orchestra. That we have fewer
musicians under contract is a simple fact of life and resources. That being the case let’s be sure they are each of the caliber
Maestro Mester requires to produce the kind of program I experienced on
Thursday.
Louisville Orchestra:
Glass, Britten, Bizet
Thursday, November 15,
2012
Friday November 16, 2012
Louisville Orchestra at
The Brown Theatre
315 W. Broadway
Louisville, KY 40202
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