Day: October 26, 2024

(I was unable to attend these concerts; the review is via the video stream posted Oct. 25.)

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with Clayton Stephenson, piano
Oct. 19-20, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center

It’s pretty rare for Igor Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”) to be upstaged in a concert program. Pianist Clayton Stephenson, conductor Valentina Peleggi and the Richmond Symphony pulled off that feat in the season-opener of the orchestra’s mainstage Symphony Series.

Stephenson, the soloist in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, balanced Jazz Age style and swagger with Chopinesque tonal sensibility, and showed an awareness that this work, especially in its central adagio, is as much a concerto for orchestra as for piano. He was as sensitive an accompanist to orchestral soloists as he was a virtuoso in the fast lanes of the outer movements.

The young, Brooklyn-born, Juilliard-schooled pianist made the concerto’s eventful first movement into a brother-from-a-different-mother of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (Gershwin, in turn, made his Piano Concerto into a not-too-distant cousin of the Ravel.) Stephenson also caught and conveyed Ravel’s nods to other composers, from Chopin to Saint-Saëns to Stravinsky.

His pacing and voicing were arresting in the lengthy opening piano solo of the adagio, a lullaby in slow-waltz time, and his subsequent accompaniments to a succession of solo winds often sounded magical – never more so than in his exchanges with the harp. His emphatic, high-powered handling of the finale would normally cap a memorable music-making appearance. But wait, there was more.

Stephenson kicked up the energy level even higher in the first of two encores, “The Tom and Jerry Show,” a hyper-rag by the Japanese jazz pianist-composer Hiromi Uehara, then mellowed out nicely in Uehara’s “Green Tea Farm,” which filters a tune that vaguely recalls Stephen Foster through a Chopin-to-Debussy tonal prism.

Altogether, Stephenson’s performance was one that should put a return visit high on the symphony’s wish list.

Stravinsky’s “Rite” may have been upstaged, but it nevertheless packed both the punch and the exoticism that this music demands. Peleggi chose a moderate, dancers’ pace, which served to clarify the score’s intricate cross-rhythms and sectional exchanges and to give time and space for its colorful and characterful wind, brass and percussion writing to bloom.

The orchestra, although heavily augmented in its wind sections, less so in its strings, sounded sufficiently balanced except in the most brassy and percussive outbursts.

Was it the most thrilling “Rite” I’ve ever heard? No, but it was played attentively, color-sensitively and without significant mishaps. Not so long ago, such a performance would be a coup for a regional orchestra peppered with substitutes and extras, and quite likely a mind-blower for its audience. That this was neither testifies to the excellence of orchestral musicians in the US today, and to how this once-revolutionary music has become familiar after resonating for more than a century through film and television music, modern jazz and other genres.

The program opened with another feast of tone color, Claude Debussy’s “La mer.” This three-part symphonic evocation of the sea’s winds and waves is the epitome of musical impression (a label Debussy despised), a succession of now-dazzling, now-hazy tone colors in constant motion, riding swells of dynamism.

All those qualities were clearly audible, if rather hard-edged, in this performance. Woodwinds and brass were unusually prominent and the strings often sounded wiry – at least in the audio of the video stream.

The wind players were as color-sensitive in the Debussy as they would be in the Ravel and Stravinsky to follow. It was a big night for blowing through tubes. Highest honors go to bassoonist Thomas Schneider, opening the “Rite” with both warmth and spookiness, and to trumpeter Sam Huss, thriving in the spotlight, under the gun and delivering the goods, seemingly every 30 seconds throughout the concert.

The video stream of this program remains accessible through May 31, 2025. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com

Christoph Wagner, cello
Joanne Kong, piano
Oct. 25, Modlin Arts Center, University of Richmond

The performing partnership of Christoph Wagner, a German cellist now teaching at the University of New Mexico, and Joanne Kong, the University of Richmond-based pianist and harpsichordist, has been ongoing for several years. The duo’s latest performance, before a well-filled Camp Concert Hall in UR’s Modlin Arts Center, showed both their crafting of complementary voices and their exploration of interesting byways in the cello-and-piano repertory.

The only repertory standard they played, Brahms’ Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 99, capped a program otherwise devoted to lesser-known works by Frédéric Chopin, Bohuslav Martinů and Giovanni Sollima, at least one of which, Martinů’s “Variations on a Slovak Theme,” rates as a miniature masterpiece.

The Martinů variations, completed shortly before the composer’s death in 1959, both recall his musical roots in Czechoslovakia and touch on the stylistic trends he absorbed in mid-20th century Paris, New York and elsewhere in a peripatetic life and career. The piece has been described as a summation of his musical odyssey, although it touches only lightly on the percolating, harmonically hazy qualities heard in his orchestral scores.

The Martinů shared the first half of the duo’s program with Chopin’s “Introduction and Polonaise brillante,” Op. 3, the work of a 20-year-old that echoes the florid showpieces of musicians such as violinist Niccolò Paganini and pianist Ignaz Moscheles, and one of the themes from Sollima’s score for the film “Il bell’ Antonio.”

Wagner and Kong gave a nervy account of the Chopin, emphasizing the piece’s brillante qualities if at times smearing its more note-heavy figurations. Their treatment of the Martinů focused more on its soulful melody, which comes from the same musical gene pool that produced Dvořák’s Slavonic dances and Brahms’ Hungarian dances, than on the composer’s more urbane modernist-neoclassical idiom. The duo’s interpretation of the Sollima centered on its darkish tonal palette, circular, torque-like energy and contrast of minimalist and romantic styles.

The Brahms sonata, composed around the same as his Fourth Symphony and Double Concerto for violin and cello (the cellist Robert Hausmann played in the premieres of both the sonata and the concerto) and reflecting the lean, classically rooted romanticism of Brahms’ late works, received a straightforward reading from the duo, notable for Kong’s reining in of the piano part to achieve sonic parity with the cello and for Wagner’s robust voicing and especially resonant pizzicatos.