A
Riveting Performance from a Rising Star
By
Tom Wachunas
“…This
is a story that commemorates living and passing through places of knowledge and
of sharing and of that song called life.”
- Jennifer Higdon, writing about blue cathedral
With Maestro
Gerhardt Zimmermann in the pulpit, as it were, the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) took us to church
with the first of the three works on its season-opening October 12 program. Written by the acclaimed
contemporary American composer, Jennifer Higdon, in 1999, blue cathedral is a tone poem inspired by the searing loss of her
younger brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, to cancer.
Higdon has explained that she thought of
cathedrals as symbolic portals, leading from our world into spiritual realms
beyond. Resonant throughout the work is the suggestion of a contemplative walk
down cathedral aisles, a slow rising past pillars and glittering stained glass
windows, through an immense ceiling to a vast blue sky, only momentarily
clouded with sorrow tinged with anger, and finally to a peaceful state of transcendent
celebration.
Special attention is given in the music to the
flute, which Higdon learned to play when she was 15, and the clarinet, her
brother’s instrument. Here, both soloists – flautist Jenny Robinson and
clarinetist Ethan Usokin – delivered achingly poignant dialogues amidst soft,
shimmering chords from the strings, with the flute eventually fading out as the
clarinet progressed alone into ecstatic quietness. Additionally, elegant
percussive effects brought a haunting dimensionality. A variety of crystalline
chimes and ringing bells augmented the sensation of being in a sacred place,
including a passage wherein members of the string section gently rotated the small
Chinese meditation balls they held in their hands, making a sound like distant
wind. All told, the orchestra rose to
this wholly mesmerizing work with a reverence so palpable, so moving, that I
felt physically uplifted.
While blue
cathedral is certainly an empyreal journey, the second selection on the
program, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor -
with its unforgettable opening of a three-octave plunge down the
keyboard – is a more earthbound experience, though no less compelling in its
fervent soulfulness. Strangely, I’ve encountered some critical assessments of
this work over the years which too quickly labeled it a tired warhorse. I’m
sure that the CSO guest soloist, Eva Gevorgyan, would heartily disagree.
There was nothing hackneyed about how this
16 year-old rising star performed the concerto with not only impeccable technical prowess and clarity,
but electrifying emotional intelligence as well. An especially arresting
element was Gevorgyan’s physical deportment. Her entire performance was infused
with a quirky yet somehow endearing theatricality, as if she had adopted the
animated mien of an entranced ballet dancer. In those passages when she wasn’t
playing, she often gazed dreamily upward, listening intently to the ensemble,
arms slowly swaying, hands poised in midair, seeming to gently grasp and sculpt
the music itself.
Gevorgyan’s
articulation of the cadenza at the end of the first movement was a breathtaking
display of youthful, sinewy vigor, and beautifully complemented by the
delicate, nuanced wistfulness of her playing in the elegiac Adagio movement. Her powerful rendering of the majestic final
movement brought the audience immediately to their feet amidst giddy howls of
approval. The encore, Alexander Scriabin’s Poem,
Opus 32, No.1, was an all-too-brief moment of elegant, introspective
lyricism.
After intermission, the orchestra’s performance
of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major was in every sense a brilliant exposition
of the work’s almost dizzying array of moods, textures, colors, and rhythms.
Still, even after the sonorous magnificence of the jubilant finale, what
remains most bright in my appreciation of this extraordinary evening is Gevorgyan’s riveting ride on Grieg’s warhorse.
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