Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
through November 16, 2014
by Michael J. Moran
The second program in the HSO’s Masterworks series this
season focused on music from the German tradition, but with an unusual (and
educational) twist. The season’s closing concert next June will feature
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and this was one of several earlier programs in which
Music Director Carolyn Kuan is finding connections to that work in other
repertoire.
She led off with a dramatic performance of Brahms’
alternately turbulent and consoling Tragic Overture, which he wrote as a darker
companion to his jubilant Academic Festival Overture in 1880. Kuan’s leadership
and the orchestra’s playing were taut and incisive.
Before the next work on the program, Richard Strauss’ tone
poem Death and Transfiguration, the musicians played an excerpt from the third
movement of Mahler’s Fourth. In spoken comments Kuan noted that the composers,
born four years apart, were lifelong rivals, or “frenemies,” whose music
influenced each other’s. After this preface, the HSO’s sublime rendition of the
Strauss, which depicts an artist only finding his ideal after death, made it
sound more Mahlerian than usual, from the vividly painful climaxes to the
transcendent hushed conclusion. Brasses, woodwinds, and two harps were
particularly evocative.
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Martina Filjak |
Intermission was followed by a riveting account of
Beethoven’s fifth and last piano concerto, nicknamed the “Emperor” presumably
for its grandeur but also because it was written in Vienna during 1809, when
Napoleon was conquering the city. The young Croatian-born soloist, Martina
Filjak, met its considerable technical demands with dazzling virtuosity. She
also scaled its interpretive heights with maturity and balance. Orchestra and
conductor were with her all the way, strings providing a warm bath of support
in the slow movement and the whole ensemble opening and closing the piece with
appropriate pomp and circumstance.
Responding to the audience’s enthusiastic applause, Filjak
then offered something completely different as an encore – a quiet “study for
the left hand” by Scriabin. The delicacy of her playing here in contrast with
Beethoven’s massive sonority was impressive. The early return of this rising
star to Hartford would clearly be most welcome to her many fans at this concert.