Deliciously Seasoned Vivaldi and Piazzolla from the Canton Symphony
Orchestra
By Tom Wachunas
At one early point on the blustery evening of
November 19, the opening lines of the holiday classic, Let It Snow, crossed my mind a few times while driving: “Oh, the
weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful…” We did indeed
have a place to go – Umstattd Hall – and a fire to gather ‘round, provided by
the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO).
One of the many
facets that make the CSO so consistently exciting, and one that was abundantly
evident on this evening, is the palpable warmth and expressivity that the
string section is able to generate. Here the ensemble, conducted by Maestro
Gerhardt Zimmermann and featuring four soloists with a CSO history, injected
the often stale familiarity of Vivaldi’s violin concertos, The Four Seasons, with remarkably fresh, exhilarating color.
Solomon Liang, CSO
Principal Second Violinist, was the picture of spritely panache as he seemed to
prance through “Spring,” replete with the trills of birdsong, the placid sounds
of a flowing brook, or a brooding sky in an approaching storm. For “Summer,”
first violinist Emily Cornelius deftly conjured the weight of heated air thick
with sweetly cooing doves and chirping finches, and the swirling of fierce
winds. CSO alumna Rachel Sandman’s rendering of “Autumn” was a swaggering romp through
what Vivaldi described as the sleep of drunkards along with the stampeding of
horses and barking hounds during a hunt. And finally, Vivek Jayaraman, the
current CSO concertmaster, masterfully delivered a wintery scene that included
evocations of chattering teeth, the stamping of cold feet, or the lilting
patter of icy rain.
Each of these
eminently gifted artists surely met, indeed exceeded, the technical demands of
their respective concertos. Additionally, beyond their impressive virtuosity,
it was their uncanny ability to paint, as it were, the pictorial and emotional
subtleties in Vivaldi’s landscapes that made this performance so impactful.
Even more
electrifying was the ensemble’s performance of Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, by
Astor Piazzolla, creator of the
“Nuevo Tango” musical style. Unlike
the Vivaldi concertos, which assign three short movements to a season, each of
Piazzolla’s seasons transpire in a single movement. While he was certainly
nodding towards Vivaldi’s charming paean to Mediterranean weather changes, keep
in mind that now we’ve been transported to the southern hemisphere, where
meteorological differences between seasons aren’t so sharply delineated.
Piazzolla’s focus wasn’t so much on pictorial description as it was mood-painting
on a profoundly engaging level.
So it is that the
ensemble’s emotive power was in full force as it became a gripping
personification of tango sensuality. Violinist Jayaraman returned, and along
with an equally impassioned CSO Principal cellist Brian Klickman, articulated
ravishing melodies, alternately witty, sexy, and melancholy, that soared
throughout the work amidst relentlessly rumbling bass lines and shifting
tempos.
Talk about breaking
a sweat at the onset of winter. We in the audience had in effect just become
grateful partners in a torrid romance. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
