VSO risks … and wins
Music Review
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VSO Music Director and violinist Jaime Laredo discusses a point with conductor Sarah Hicks as the VSO rehearses David Ludwig’s new Double Concerto, which premiered this past weekend in Burlington and Rutland. Jim Lowe/Times Argus |
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By Jim Lowe Times Argus Staff - Published: January 27, 2009
BURLINGTON – The Vermont Symphony Orchestra cutting-edge? It’s hard to imagine, but Saturday’s Masterworks concert at the Flynn Center – in which two of the three works performed were world premieres – is something that very few orchestras would attempt. And despite these financially difficult times, the hall was full and the audience was enthusiastic.
David Ludwig’s new Double Concerto, written for and performed by VSO Music Director Jaime Laredo on violin and Sharon Robinson on cello, engendered real excitement in the audience, while Addison composer Jorge Martín’s pastoral Romance proved both striking and moving.
Guest conductor Sarah Hatsuko Hicks, a rising star on the national scene, led these new works and one of the great “war horses,” Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” Suite, with skill and youthful exuberance. (The program was repeated Sunday afternoon at Rutland’s Paramount Theatre.) The VSO, the country’s oldest state-sponsored orchestra, is preceding its 75th anniversary season with a year of works written during the orchestra’s existence. Although it includes symphonic favorites like the 1936 Prokofiev, the VSO is performing much new and relatively unknown music. And as though the VSO weren’t taking enough risk, it announced a new $3.5 million endowment campaign Jan. 21 – but it already has raised $2.6 million.
Ludwig’s Double Concerto successfully combined atonality, making it striking, spicy and fresh, and a superficial tonality, engendering the audience’s sympathy and compelling it to follow. A traditional concerto in many ways, some 26 minutes with its three movements in the usual fast-slow-fast configuration, it ostensibly describes three types of love, and there are two intriguing interludes.
The opening movement, marked con moto and describing Eros, sexual love, is percussive, insistent and raucous in the manner of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Full of percussion and strident winds and brass, its insistent repetitive violin solo contrasted the expressive lyrical cello part. Between the first two movements, the unsettling but riveting interlude “Calypso’s Dance” pits the lyrical solo violin against tuned wood blocks (in this case, small walnut slabs).
The slow movement, an adagio reflecting agapa, courtly love, is richly lyrical while the solos express the feelings of two elegant lovers. In the following interlude, “Iseult’s Alba,” the solo cello’s lament is joined minimally by various members of the orchestra.
The final movement, again con moto but based on phila, brotherly love, begins jauntily, moving through a few beautifully lyrical passages to its raucous end. This is a substantial work, exciting and moving, adding yet another double concerto to the repertoire written for Laredo and Robinson, joining those by David Danielpour, Daron Hagen, Ned Rorem, Miklos Rosza and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.
Laredo’s playing was silky smooth, yet incisive and passionate, while Robinson’s was warm and overtly expressive – they were both in top form.
Hicks and the VSO delivered the complex orchestra part with a precision and flair that only genuine enthusiasm could have engendered. Ludwig, VSO composer-in-residence since 2004, who teaches at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he lives, is the grandson of Marlboro Festival co-founder Rudolf Serkin.
Hicks and the VSO gave its all as well to Martín’s Romance, enlarged from the chamber orchestra version commissioned by the VSO for its 1999 Made in Vermont Festival tour, adding brass and a few measures to bring it to some 12 minutes. Largely string-heavy, it has a nocturnal feel to it, again with internal conflict that doesn’t break the tonal surface, save for a brash and brassy interlude in the middle. It’s a finely crafted tone poem.
The Cuban-born Martín, who came to Vermont via New York some 15 years ago, is perhaps better known for his vocal works. His one-act opera “Tobermory” won the Fifth Biennial Chamber Opera Competition and has been performed in Eugene, New Orleans, Kansas City and at the Lake George Opera Festival, and his song cycle, “The Glass Hammer,” was recorded by baritone Sanford Sylvan. Martín’s opera “Before Night Falls” will be premiered by the Fort Worth Opera in 2010.
Surprisingly, the least interesting performance was the Prokofiev. Still, although it lacked some of its inherent romanticism and overt washes of tonal color, Hicks focused on the storytelling nature of the music, emphasizing the details of the action. It was a spirited performance.