Medically advised to avoid crowded public events, I cannot yet attend concerts. The Richmond Symphony is making video streams of its mainstage concerts available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program became accessible on Oct. 4.
Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Daisuke Yamamoto, violin
Sept. 30, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
The Richmond Symphony opened its 2023-24 mainstage season with two tone poems, one titled a concerto, the other a symphony.
The Italian composer Andrea Portera’s “Eudaimonic” Concerto (“eudaimonic” is an ancient Greek term for human flourishing), receiving its premiere with Daisuke Yamamoto, the symphony’s concertmaster, as violin soloist, is not a conventional concerto.
The work, which, the composer says, draws “inspirations from anthropology, Jungian psychology, poetry and mathematics,” is not really a showcase for the violin; nor is it meant to be an exercise in self-expression. “For me, music is not the representation of myself or my personality,” Portera writes. “Music is a kind of distorting mirror, where every listener see[s] their own interiority. The result will be different for each individual, like a projective Rorschach test.”
Portera separates the concerto’s three movements with two interludes in which the violinist plays and sings, joined in the second interlude by a muted chant from other members of the orchestra. The violinist is a true soloist mainly in passages that could be termed soliloquies; otherwise, the instrument is a voice within an orchestration that often sounds like a bubbling cauldron of tone colors. The composer packs a lot of notes and expressive implications into 17 minutes.
Valentina Peleggi, the symphony’s music director and a onetime conservatory classmate of Portera’s, led an eventful, meticulously sonorous reading of the concerto, kaleidoscopically colorful, transparent in its sound textures. Continuity is a challenge in this piece; Yamamoto, Peleggi and the orchestra, rather than trying to undo its episodic character, played up the contrasts between episodes.
After a single hearing, my Rorschach test is unreadable. I was focused more on the music’s externalities – the way it sounds and moves – rather than its effect on my psychic innards. Through most of the piece, my ears were swimming in swells of orchestral color, not conscious of a musical flow (or not yet conscious, as I might become on subsequent hearings). The abrupt endings of movements were jolting; perhaps listeners are expected to imagine their own resolutions.
Gustav Mahler introduced his Symphony No. 1 in D major in 1889 as a “tone poem in symphonic form.” He subtitled the piece “Titan,” then thought better of it. He revised the work several times, dropping “Blumine” (“Flower Song”), one of its original five movements, and enlarging the original orchestration. The now-standard version of the symphony took 10 years to take shape.
This performance used the standard version, but the conductor seemed more attuned to Mahler’s initial conception of the work as a tone poem.
Peleggi paced marches and rustic dance themes briskly, and treated lyrical passages as slow, contemplative or dreamy interludes. This approach heightened the contrasts within the work – and gave wind soloists and choirs time and space to play expressively and with unusual subtlety – but also tended to splice the symphony into now lingering, now propulsive episodes. These tempo adjustments added three or four minutes to the symphony’s usual length.
Peleggi also adopted some old-school romantic interpretive touches, such as string portamento (slides from one note to the next) and Viennese-style rhythmic hiccups in the second movement’s Ländler dance tempo. These were common practices among conductors of Mahler’s generation, but much less so among interpreters in later generations.
A few cracked notes and loose threads of ensemble aside, this performance effectively balanced Mahler’s tone-poetics and symphonic form, songful in the main but propulsive and explosive when it needed to be. Not the only, and arguably not the ideal, way to play this symphony, but one that offered its share of rewards.
The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com
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