Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic
Sometimes when the temperature drops, the music-making heats up. Events at Blossom Music Center over the weekend certainly supported this scenario. Thanks to two artists making debuts, a departing conductor and an ensemble that gave its estimable all, the concerts were joys from start to finish.
Saturday's program introduced Brazilian conductor Roberto Minczuk and Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter to the Cleveland Orchestra and audiences in music of Wagner, Chopin and Brahms, while Sunday's concert gave assistant conductor Andrew Grams the chance to bid fantastic farewell in French works after three years in the post.
The weekend's activities confirmed that a new generation of fine conductors is eager to show its stuff. Minczuk, music director of Canada's Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, presided over his Blossom program with stylistic sensitivity and architectural command.
The opening work Saturday was Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" overture, in which Minczuk communicated the stormy qualities as deftly as he shaped the lyrical and noble passages. A few moments suggested the need for one more rehearsal, but the performance had copious sweep and elasticity.
Minczuk was even better in Brahms' Symphony No. 2, the most optimistic of the composer's essays in the form. Every corner of the score sounded renewed in Minczuk's account, which was marked by judicious momentum, poetic flexibility and rhythmic lucidity.
The conductor was fully involved in the unfolding incidents. He shaped phrases with an instinctive sense of line and path, while placing everything in large context. And Minczuk had the orchestra playing at the top of its game, with instrumental sections in clear balance and the musicians immersing themselves in Brahms' winsome and jubilant ideas.
Between German monuments came Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2, to which Fliter applied a spectrum of nuances. The 2006 winner of the Gilmore Artist Award possesses the fluency and tonal gold the piece demands. She brought vibrant temperament to Chopin's moody writing and played the second movement's poetic utterances as if they were sent from heaven. Minczuk and the orchestra were taut contributors in an accompaniment that can sound clunky.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
St. Louis
04/11/2007
SLSO, Minczuk in fine evening
By Sarah Bryan Miller
POST-DISPATCH CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC
Sunday, Nov. 04 2007
Roberto Minczuk is one of the more reliable conductors to visit the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on a regular basis. On Friday night, he brought a nicely mixed program to Powell Symphony Hall: one rarity from the 1930s, one fascinating piece written in 2000, and one well-loved standard.
The concert opened with "Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca " by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Written for a small and unusually configured orchestra (violins, basses, winds, brass, piano and percussion) in memory of the Spanish poet, it's colorful and alternatively celebratory and mournful, ending with a bright riot of sounds.
Given its Symphony premiere this weekend, it was an interesting departure from the usual. It got a solid reading from Minczuk and the orchestra, with especially notable contributions from pianist Peter Henderson.
The evening's soloist was principal cello Daniel Lee; his vehicle was Esa-Pekka Salonen's "Mania." The work might almost better be called "Perpetual Motion," because it gives neither the soloist nor the small orchestra any rest in its 17 minutes.
The motion is dreamy to begin with, with strong minimalist influences for the orchestral accompaniment. It turns into a disturbing dream after a while, with a busy, sudden end.
"Mania" presents huge challenges to the soloist. Lee met them splendidly, tossing off his fiendishly difficult part with apparent ease. St. Louis is
lucky to have him.
The orchestra carried off its parts well, with fine solo moments from principal bass Erik Harris and assistant principal bassoon Andrew Gott. The strings
shimmered beautifully under Minczuk's direction. Concertmaster David Halen won the Good Colleague of the Week award: When Lee knocked the score from his music stand, Halen made the save and replaced it.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," op. 35, offered something more like maximalism, with the full orchestra onstage for a satisfying rendition of a familiar work.
Halen's violin sang gorgeously in his extended solos; St. Louis is lucky to have him, too. He was well-supported by the rest of the orchestra and its other soloists, particularly associate principal cello Melissa Brooks-Rubright and assistant principal clarinet Diana Haskell, who found all the sinuous Oriental exoticism in her part.
Minczuk made the most of Rimsky-Korsakov's gifts as a master of orchestral color and shaped the score for maximum effect.
The audience was once again distressingly small on Friday night. That's disturbing no matter when it happens, but all the more so on a beautiful night
in early fall. Music-making this good deserves to have more people in the audience.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
San Francisco
10/11/2007
Review: Minczuk, leading Symphony, makes case as a name to remember
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The first many of us in San Francisco heard of conductor Roberto Minczuk was a year ago, when he swooped in as a last-minute substitution to lead the touring London Philharmonic in a superbly vigorous and fearless account of Mahler's First Symphony. It was the kind of concert that makes you tell yourself, "Remember that name."
On Thursday, Minczuk returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead the San Francisco Symphony for the first time, and demonstrated that last year's success was no fluke. This Brazilian conductor, who holds posts in Calgary and Rio de Janeiro, is a formidable podium talent, one who combines vigor and precision in an irresistible blend.
If Thursday's concert was less exciting overall than last year's introduction, chalk it up to the programming and the supporting cast. The London Phil program introduced the astonishing young Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan (who, coincidentally, returns to Davies next week to play Mendelssohn with the Symphony), whereas Minczuk spent the first half of Thursday's performance on music that didn't amount to much.
But after intermission, he came through with a rendition of Dvorák's "New World" Symphony that made something potent and new out of this over-familiar score. What Minczuk offered was nothing particularly radical or rethought, just a gripping and at times rhythmically tumultuous traversal of the music.
One of the conductor's hallmarks - and this showed up during the London Phil concert as well - is a taste for robust, almost thick orchestral textures that never sound stodgy or ponderous.
In the first movement of the Dvorák, he favored an expansive, dark-hued sound that got things off to an exciting start, and his rhythmic approach - crisply propulsive but always in control - made the performance even more electrifying. Yet when the music grew sparer or sunnier, as in the first movement's closing theme or the trio of the scherzo, Minczuk willingly turned up the brightness control and let the textures sparkle.
And for all his dynamism, the high point of the performance came in the still-voiced Largo, with its richly cushioned string accompaniments and the famously plangent melody for English horn. Russ deLuna, in his first high-profile assignment since joining the orchestra this season, dispatched it with tender grace.
The first half of the evening was more run-of-the-mill. Minczuk opened with the Symphonic Variations of José Antônio Resende de Almeida Prado, a 15-minute opus written for a Brazilian student orchestra and dedicated to the conductor, who led the world premiere two years ago.
The piece is based on an easily traceable theme made up of piles of melodic thirds, and Almeida Prado puts it through 10 transformations while swiveling the spotlight to different sections of the orchestra. So the strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion each get a chance to take an initial bow, after which the composer combines them in different ways to produce a fugue, a rhapsody, a toccata and so on.
It's all perfectly correct, and Almeida Prado can write zestfully for the orchestra, especially when he introduces some dance rhythms to help along his functional melodic theme. But the choppiness of the variation form gives the piece a start-and-stop feeling, and not even Minczuk's committed performance could quite make the case.
Still, that was better than what followed, the first Symphony performance of Martinu's Concerto for Two Pianos, with Katia and Marielle Labèque as the soloists. No knock on the Labèque sisters, who tromped through this 1942 score with plenty of verve and technical razzle-dazzle. But Martinu's score must have the highest ratio of notes to actual interest of any concerto in the repertoire, which is saying something. The two fast outer movements are unbroken stretches of clangorous display, with both pianists and the full orchestra playing practically nonstop; the lighter slow movement has some beautiful passages but nothing to dispel the surrounding black clouds.