I am medically advised to be cautious about attending crowded public events, including Richmond Symphony concerts. The orchestra is making video streams of its Symphony Series performances available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program was posted on May 8.
Anthony Parnther conducting
with Dominic Rotella, French horn
May 4-5, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
Anthony Parnther contrasted two modes of classical expression in a guest-conducting date with the Richmond Symphony, leading the Symphony No. 3 in C minor of the long-overlooked composer Florence Price, then turning to the cheerful classicism of Mozart and Beethoven.
Parnther, the Virginia-born music director of California’s San Bernardino Symphony, proved to be a rare bird among musicians of his generation (he’s 43), in being a fine conductor who’s also a good talker. His verbal introductions of the three pieces gave useful musical perspective in vernacular language, garnished with bursts of humor. (Virginia place names, such as Tappahannock and Fluvanna, sound to him like “Lord of the Rings” destinations.)
In the Price, which opened the program, Parnther and the symphony players nicely balanced weightiness – her Third Symphony is one of this pioneering Black female composer’s largest-scaled and most ambitious works – with animated and well-accented handling of dance rhythms.
The performance sounded a bit too straightforward in its treatment of lyrical themes. Price’s music, for all its folkloric references and semi-modernist employment of percussion, celesta and harp, is very much in the romantic tradition. Brass often outweighed strings (at least in the audio of the online stream), which tended to nudge melodies out of the sonic foreground.
The symphony strings sounded warmer and weightier alongside the more limited wind and percussive forces of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 4 in E flat major, K. 495, featuring Dominic Rotella as the soloist, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F major.
Rotella, the orchestra’s principal French horn player, delivered a solidly sonorous account of the Mozart, with a suitably vocal sense of phrasing in the central romanza, and followed the concerto with an encore of Zsolt Nagy’s “Happy Blues,” a jocular piece full of challenging technical twists.
Parnther gave the Beethoven Eighth “big-band” treatment, reminding the listener that light Beethoven is still Beethoven, but lightened the tonal mass with brisk tempos and sharp accents. It was serious fun.
The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com
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