Supporting the Arts in Western Massachusetts and Beyond

January 26, 2021

REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Spotlight Series

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
January 22-February 17, 2021
by Michael J. Moran

 

The third concert in the HSO’s monthly virtual “Spotlight Series” of 60-minute performances by HSO ensembles and guests recorded at Hartford area venues is now available on-demand at the orchestra’s web site through February 17, 2021, at 5:00 pm. 

Jeffrey Krieger
 

Entitled “Music for Cello Quartet,” it included five pieces by Corrette, Albinoni, Ravel, Gruetzmacher, and Piazzolla and was filmed in a colorfully lit recording studio at Parkville Sounds in Hartford. The four HSO cellists featured are: Principal cello Jeffrey Krieger; Assistant Principal cello Jia Cao; and cello section members Cara Cheung and Peter Zay. The full ensemble performs every piece. 

 

The diverse program opened with a charming and elegant account of eighteenth-century French composer Michel Corrette’s three-movement “Le Phenix” Concerto. Next came an impassioned reading of seventeenth-century Italian composer Tomaso Albinoni’s more familiar “Adagio,” which, as Cheung noted, has turned up in film soundtracks from “Flashdance” and “Gallipoli” to “Manchester by the Sea.”

 

The concert’s centerpiece was also its unlikeliest selection – an arrangement by British cellist James Barralet of Maurice Ravel’s 1928 orchestral showpiece “Bolero.” While not replicating the famous snare drum part, the cello can produce a range of percussive sounds, and this quartet bowed, plucked, and tapped their way through the single crescendo theme with lively enthusiasm and surprising sonic variety. New harmonies even emerged from time to time that are not heard in the original version.      

 

This was followed by a stately reading of the “Consecration Hymn” by nineteenth-century German cellist (the only one among these five composers) Friedrich Gruetzmacher, to whom Zay traced a personal connection through several generations of teachers. The program ended in a blaze of energy with Argentinian tango master Astor Piazzolla’s exuberant 1974 “Libertango.”

 

The Parkville acoustics were appropriately warm and rich. It was refreshing to see the musicians comfortably dressed in casual attire, and the personal stories they told about their relationships with the cello while introducing the music through Covid masks they wore throughout the concert helpfully bridged some of the distance they must feel from their traditionally live audience. HSO Board Vice Chair Diane Whitney brought additional warmth in her brief welcome and closing remarks.

January 19, 2021

REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Masterworks In-Depth

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
January 15-20, 2021
by Michael J. Moran

The fourth program in the HSO’s monthly “Masterworks In-Depth” series of virtual conversations about music they would have played at Covid-cancelled concerts this season will be available on the HSO web site through Wednesday, January 20, at 5:00 pm. Led by HSO Music Director Carolyn Kuan, this 69-minute webinar focused on two of three pieces originally scheduled.

This month’s concert would have highlighted African-American music. While Kuan omitted so-called “dean of African-American composers” William Grant Still’s orchestral rhapsody “Darker America,” the time she gained was well spent on his lesser-known contemporary, Florence Price. The first African-American woman whose music was performed by a major orchestra (the Chicago Symphony in 1933), her “Concerto in One Movement” was to be performed by rising young pianist Michelle Cann, with guest conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, founding director of the Philadelphia-based Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra. Kuan’s Zoom conversations with both African-American musicians were enlightening and inspiring.

But Kuan began with a video performance clip from the second movement (whose main theme is also known as “Going Home”) of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony, the concert’s featured work. Appointed in 1892 by American arts patron Jeannette Thurber as head of her National Conservatory of Music in New York, Dvorak reflected the spirit of African-American music in this masterpiece and championed it as the basis of a distinctly American style of classical music.
 
Segments Kuan showed next from the documentary “Caged Bird” made it clear that although the Arkansas-born Price was a musical “child prodigy,” a lack of career opportunities led her into what Johnson called the kind of “forced entrepreneurship that arises from disenfranchisement, a profoundly American experience.” A video clip of Cann performing a Price sonata movement confirmed what Kuan called the composer’s “unique voice,” which radiated, in Cann’s words, “so much heart and soul.”
 
The conversation also clarified what a difference mentors and role models have made in the careers of all three women, all the way from Brahms mentoring Dvorak, to Thurber’s acceptance of women and African-Americans at her conservatory, to the impact on ten-year-old Cann of seeing African-American conductor Thomas Wilkins on the podium, to the life-changing advice of her (and Kuan’s) mentor Marin Alsop that Johnson should start her own ensemble.