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FESTIVAL MIAMI
FROST SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
THOMAS SLEEPER/ RICHARD STOLTZMAN
ELGAR/ FINZI (11-4-06)
HEARTY BLAST OF BRITISH MUSIC SERVED UP AT FESTIVAL MIAMI
By Lawrence Budmen
British music of serene and agitated character was the hearty fare at the final concert of Festival Miami on Saturday. The gifted students in the Frost Symphony Orchestra could hardly have had a more impressive showcase.
Sir Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Op.36 (Enigma) is a landmark of British orchestral music and the greatest essay in this genre since Brahms’s Haydn Variations. The outward calm of the principal theme is broken by a series of dynamic, sorrowful, and witty variations that culminate in one of the most stirring finales in orchestral music.
Despite a few minor slips in the winds and brass, the orchestra’s performance was a remarkable accomplishment for a student ensemble. The young musicians essayed Elgar’s orchestral showpiece with vitality and assurance. Principal cellist Amanda Andreason’s lustrous solo was shaped with aristocratic fluency.
Conductor Thomas Sleeper was alert to the score’s mercurial changes of mood and meter. His beautifully spun reading of the elegiac Nimrod variation was grave and wistful. A heroic burst of clarion trumpets capped Sleeper’s brilliant version of this touchstone work.
Sleeper’s idiomatic affinity for British orchestral music was also strongly evident in his impassioned accompaniment to clarinetist Richard Stoltzman’s performance of the Clarinet Concerto, Op.31 by Gerald Finzi.
Although Finzi’s 1949 work requires torrents of virtuosity, it is not an instrumental display piece in the conventional sense. The pensive turbulence of the opening Allegro vigoroso and dark ambivalence of the Adagio vividly conveys tragedy and restlessness (through the composer’s signature contrapuntal neo-classicism). In the concluding Rondo, Finzi reverts to pastoral tone painting and imaginative recreation of modal harmonies and English folk song.
After some initially tentative playing, Stoltzman returned to form and tossed off the finale’s high register acrobatics with panache, accompanied by exceptionally silky strings. Stoltzman’s mellow tone enveloped the Adagio’s haunting aura in a performance of ethereal melancholy.
Promenade – Walking the Dog from George Gershwin’s score for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Shall We Dance (an encore) was vintage Stoltzman. His light, jazzily bouncy rendition recalled his big band sessions with Woody Herman.
Copyright Miami Herald
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