Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
May 3–5, 2019
by Michael J. Moran
The three pieces on the eighth “Masterworks” program of the
HSO’s 75th season, led by their Music Director Carolyn Kuan, packed about as
much musical variety as possible into a single concert, thanks largely to the
featured soloists, genre-defying string trio Time for Three (Tf3).
The program opened with a shattering performance by the
large orchestra of the “Four Sea Interludes” from Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera
“Peter Grimes.” Reflecting the tortured soul of the title character, a
fisherman on the Suffolk coast of England, where Britten grew up, the music
also evokes the overwhelming power of nature over the lives of his village
community. Kuan and the HSO captured the full range of its shifting moods and
colors.
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| Time for Three (Tf3) |
Consisting of violinists Nick Kendall and Charles Yang and
double bassist Ranaan Meyer, Tf3 next came bounding out on stage to join the
orchestra in Jennifer Higdon’s “Concerto 4-3,” written for and dedicated to
them in 2007. Inspired by the bluegrass music she heard growing up in East
Tennessee, it “incorporates,” in Higdon’s words, “Tf3’s unique string
techniques … mimicking everything from squeaking mice to electric guitars.” The
casual attire and rock star motions of the energetic trio added visual thrills
to the concerto’s fast-slow-fast movements, titled “The Shallows,” “Little
River,” and “Roaring Smokies.”
Kuan and the HSO clearly enjoyed letting their hair down
with Tf3 here and in the first of their two dazzling encores: a tribute to
Beethoven written by the band and sung by Yang; and an uninhibited take on
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
The concert closed after intermission with a forceful
account of perhaps the best known symphony by any composer, Beethoven’s fifth.
Written over a four-year period (1804-1808) when, as Yang had just sung, the
composer was about two-thirds deaf, its four movements depict the typical
symphonic progression through struggle to victory.
From the iconic opening four-note motif of the stormy
“Allegro con brio” first movement, through the calm “Andante con moto” and the
tempestuous “Allegro” scherzo, to the triumphant final “Allegro,” conductor and
orchestra reveled not only in the vigor and clarity of Beethoven’s notes but in
the sheer joy of music-making that even his deafness could never take from him
and that everyone on the Belding stage exuded.
