Courtesy KSO
Cabrera.
With something like a gambit, New Haven Symphony Orchestra music director candidate Donato Cabrera scored a pedagogical victory, showing the audience a wide range of sounds with a selection of pieces designed to show off different sections of the orchestra before bringing a full symphony orchestra at the close.
The Dvořák 8th symphony, the piece that concluded the concert, was the perfect bit of symphonic repertoire for the NHSO’s Friday concert at Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. It offered a serious formal piece with clear melodic and rhythmic motifs that gently led the listener along through its breezy 35 minutes.
First, however, the program exploded out of the gate with Anna Clyne’s “Stride,” which deconstructed ideas from Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathetique” for piano. Taking full advantage of the homogeneity of the string section, sounds faded in and out from nowhere, with an almost woozy quality. Shimmering tremolos — a fast repeated bowing motion that often builds sonic tension — blipped and pulsed in volume. The use of Beethoven’s ideas was almost a red herring, a means of effectively introducing audiences to modernist language, which the strings of the NHSO brought the full beauty out of. Moments of conventional classical harmony would sometimes be led astray by Clyne, looking 200 years into the past, and seeming determined to cause a little havoc.
“Stride” was also an effective demonstration of the full abilities of massed strings, where bowing the strings closer to the bridge or to the fingerboard produces more ghostly or raspy tones, and adding bow pressure can add a percussive illusion to the beginning of a note. Readers familiar with Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho might be familiar with some of these sounds, and it is no accident that they are often associated with tension and anxiety. But they were used to gorgeous effect here, like a cloud the piece would occasionally float through during its progression.
At the podium, Cabrera was an eloquent advocate for each of the pieces performed. He encouraged audiences, if they felt moved, to clap between movements — formerly an unspoken taboo of concert hall etiquette. Cabrera offered that those tempted to shush the clappers introduce themselves instead.
In the lobby during intermission, concertgoers Marguerite and Matt Kreuzkamp mentioned how much they appreciated these efforts to welcome relative novices to classical music like them into the experience. Marguerite said it was her second time seeing the orchestra, and was enjoying the educational effort of the program.
The performance of Emmanuel Sejourné’s Concerto for Marimba and Strings was originally scheduled for the 2020 season, and the performance was postponed at that time. Luckily soloist and NHSO principal percussionist Aya Kaminaguchi received her opportunity to perform the piece this season under Cabrera’s baton, and it was a mesmerizing feat for the audience to witness this performance.
The piece began with sentimental chords setting a melancholic tone for a few minutes, before the marimba, a tuned percussion instrument with wooden slats, entered unaccompanied, introducing audiences to the instrument with a pyrotechnic display of arpeggios. Armed with two mallets in each hand, Kaminaguchi sometimes leapt from one side of the seven-foot-long instrument to the other, drawing rubato phrases out of the instrument inspired by the romantic piano repertoire. In some moments in the first movement, Kaminaguchi accompanied the orchestra with chords played in delicate tremolos with an incredible control of dynamics and phrasing. Sejourné’s use of the strings was functional, lacking some of the elegance displayed in the Clyne, but the marimba writing and performance was compelling throughout. The more active second movement was more harmonically adventurous in its opening, before settling into an extended vamp in 11/8 that spotlighted the marimba like a jazz soloist.
As an encore, Kaminaguchi performed, unaccompanied, what seemed like a transcription of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” displaying no shortage of physicality as she brought arpeggios all the way up the instrument’s five octaves. For both the concerto and encore, Kaminaguchi earned standing ovations, and flowers from admirers.
After the intermission, the program continued with Richard Strauss’ “Serenade in E♭”. It featured only 14 players on stage — clarinets, oboes, bassoons, flutes, French horns and tuba — situated upstage with the conductor and illuminated with focused lighting, an almost stark picture. Cabrera led the ensemble through Strauss’s youthful imitation of Mozart, and while the work does not show much of the more distinctive personality that would emerge in later Strauss, there’s enough variation in the accompaniment texture throughout that keeps the piece compelling through the work’s 13 minutes.
“And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: the symphony orchestra,” announced Cabrera as the last of the orchestra filed on, and other members played through sporadic passages from the work to come. The comment was met with applause and cheers. The anticipation was palpable.
And even this seasoned audience member was slightly better equipped to appreciate the orchestra together, having just heard it divided in so many different formats. The Dvořák 8th makes a very sound case for the united symphony orchestra, with some hummable melodies passed all around various combinations of the orchestra, across section and instrument type, with transparency as to how it all unfolds but still some great moments of orchestral illusion.
Some notes from the performance include: “Impossibly long flute note into full orchestra crescendo — bassoon chords pushing through energetic string build — sweetness of flute and oboe over tremolo strings.” The first movement invited applause with its energetic, clearly foreshadowed conclusion. But the symphony was full of moments where instruments worked together — and sometimes against each other — to bring shape and momentum to the sonic possibilities of the orchestra. In contrast to the Clyne, which imagined the string ensemble as a distinct, unpredictable entity, the Dvořák was very clear about what it was doing, with what parts of the orchestra, and why. And was, in this context, an excellent choice for demonstrating why someone would bother assembling more than 60 people on a stage, and why many more than that would bother attending.
During the intermission, Margaret and Stefan (who were especially enthusiastic about the Dvořák) mentioned how happy they were to experience art communally again. A multigenerational slice of New Haven was feeling that on Friday night, and got a glimpse of one possible future for the NHSO.
The next NHSO Music Director Candidate concert is on Friday, Mar. 10 at 7:30 p.m., at SCSU’s Lyman Center, and features Tania Miller conducting Beethoven, Schumann and Silvestrov.
