Elgin Symphony Premiers Two Classics with Passion and Drama

A large audience was delighted by a concert of "Passionate Drama" performed by the Elgin Symphony Orchestra Sunday at the Hemmens. An excellent program and effective marketing generated the longest lines we've seen at the box office so far this season.

Bedrich Smetana's "Sarka" (1876) and Antonin Dvorak's "Symphony No. 7" (1885) were the Czech and Czech mate in these two victorious premieres for the ESO. Principal clarinetist Gene Collerd led a stalwart wind section whose precision continues to impress.

Remarks by a poised and affable Maestro Andrew Grams are always welcomed, and his introduction to "Sarka" was especially well placed, since the excellent program notes are hard to read in small print under dim light.

Dvorak's Seventh spoke for itself in symphonic language that all listeners understood. Its Beethoven-like development of atomic musical ideas was recounted convincingly by a very well-rehearsed ensemble, and smiling patrons were amazed the piece had never been heard in Elgin before.

The concert highlight was a stellar performance of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto (1941) performed by magnetic soloist Philippe Quint. Barber's modern American variety of styles provided Quint an intriguing three-part platform for displaying his technical and interpretive genius. 

Violinist Philippe Quint performs with Andrew Grams and the Elgin Symphony Orchestra

The 1708 Stradivarius gave a mellow voice to the low register, and was satiny smooth as Quint worked the upper positions with amazing tone and accuracy. The orchestra is forgiven for being overly sympathetic in just a few places.

After Quint's performance, the ladies were the first to leap from their seats with applause before settling down to pore over his biography. The body language between the charismatic Quint and Grams was a feast for the eyes and the ears.

Moving freely around the podium, Grams was at his best, injecting passion into every phrase, and drawing out long, dramatic pauses between second and third movements. Yet he's aware the most important part of any piece for the audience is its ending, and these three works were superbly combined to leave the audience, after more than ninety minutes, still wanting even more.

Elgin Symphony Presents a Concert of Understated Excellence

A superb program of Nielsen and Dvorak did all the talking in a casual but outstanding Elgin Symphony matinee Sunday, featuring guest conductor José Luis Gomez.

Two works by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen were heard for the first time by ESO audiences. An orchestra of larger proportions leapt into the first, an opening overture from Nielsen's opera Maskarade (1906) led by a vibrant maestro Gomez, whose natural yet precise conducting ended with a smiling and flamboyant turn toward the audience.

José Luis Gomez conducts Carter Brey and the Elgin
Symphony Orchestra.

Joining the orchestra for Antonin Dvorak's Concerto in B Minor for Cello and Orchestra (1896) was Carter Brey, principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic. Brey listened intently and turned to look at the other players during the first movement's opening, which lifted the entire audience's consciousness of this beautifully played work. 

Shifting fluidly from growling lows to sweetly lyrical highs, Brey displayed great rapport with Gomez, and also with a particularly sympathetic wind section, playing so expressively throughout that one listener was moved to say, "I could almost understand the words ..." Brey's untucked shirt and relaxed comportment signalled that this virtuoso's performance would speak for itself, and it did so eloquently. 

The delightful Symphony No. 2 (1902) is one of Nielsen's growing number of works that are gaining new interest worldwide. The four movements, inspired by the Four Temperaments of ancient psychology, depart from classical symphonic conventions and explore shades of human nature the way a Freudian therapist might: through a network of imagery and associations. 

The ESO was incredibly well-rehearsed for this Elgin premiere, and the musical language of Nielsen proved to be endlessly fascinating. It was an impressive showing for Gomez, whose conducting style exhibited its own four-way humanistic balance of head, hands, heart and hips.

It is also a credit to the considerable talent and skill of the ESO and staff that guest artists of this caliber continue to bring their world-class performances to downtown Elgin.

Elgin Symphony's Impassioned "Don Juan and Dvorak"

Shouts of approval from the hall capped the finale of the ESO's "Don Juan and Dvorak" program of classics Friday afternoon at the Hemmens. The audience took every opportunity to applaud Elgin's acclaimed orchestra, now in its 61st season. In fact, the enthusiastic response to Music Director Robert Hanson's first appearance on stage was exceeded only by the standing ovation at the concert's end.  The ESO displayed superb artistry in the two hour program, performing a diverse and delightful set of classics that explored the musical expressions of drama, dance, poetry, and song.

None other than Mozart gives us the first of two musical takes on the legend of Don Juan, the mythical Spanish playboy whose quest for knowledge of the opposite sex eventually leads to his own destruction. In the overture to the comic opera known as Don Giovanni, Mozart deftly sets the stage for tragedy as well as comedy in a characteristically entertaining style that invites you into the drama like only the cleverest book jacket blurb or movie preview. A consummate showman at heart, the composer finished the overture the very day before its 1787 premiere in Prague.  Two hundred twenty-four years later, the ESO played it as if it was being heard for the first time: with freshness, intensity and an obvious affection for the audience and the art.

We may never know the number of Don Juan's children, but his literary and artistic progeny span at least twenty generations. His legend was the subject and namesake of Richard Strauss's breakout symphonic poem, written a century after Mozart's opera, when Strauss was only 24. At its opening flourish, you realize that this is like no poetry you've heard before. Images of a dashing Don Juan spring to life from the orchestra: you can hear silver conchos jangling on his belt, see his sword slicing the air, feel his breath as if he's striding towards you. This music tests every limit of the orchestra to produce all the effects of a motion picture without pictures or dialogue.  At Maestro Hanson's direction, the combined forces of more than sixty-five musicians are able to create a kind of superhuman musical voice, just the sort of thing that would preoccupy Strauss's imagination for the rest of his life. From tender, lyrical, romantic interludes to fierce moments of conflict, the ESO conveyed a full and complex range of pathos with a brilliant musical technique, ending the Don's story with a three-note ellipsis that would seem to say, "we'll be hearing much more from this young composer."

Yet it is often the simplest phrases and quietest notes that separate a good musician from a great one. The abundance of such in the Ancient Airs and Dances -- Suite No. 1 leave no doubt which sort of musician plays in the ESO. The endearingly coy rhythms of Ottorio Respighi's modern setting of Renaissance formal dances proved that there is beauty in restraint. Elegant solos and duets by double reeds and strings against a transparent but perfectly syncrhonized orchestral accompaniment were as fluid and intimate as those of a seasoned quartet. Unlike a similar suite by his English contemporary Peter Warlock, Respighi's use of lute-like harp chords — and harpsichord — lent a loving, period authenticity to the work, which still moves us, musician and audience alike, to tap our feet and nod our heads with the music as we recall the ancient urge to dance.

Following the intermission, the concert concluded with Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, considered an unusually cheerful work from a period when other composers of his own generation were writing music with much darker tones. The sights and sounds of his native Bohemia would seem to have inspired many of his musical motifs, whose natural, song-like phrasings are easy to grasp and remember. Colorful flute solos and a clarinet duet decorated the four movements, which ventured smoothly through numerous changes of tempo and meter, each section in turn playing perfectly in unison, then in harmony.

As his career progressed, Dvorak gravitated westward, eventually spending three years in America where he would leave us an important musical gift: not just his famous Ninth Symphony "From the New World," nor his "American Suite," but a lasting vision for American music that included the unique influences of Native American and African American sounds. If you listen closely to the fourth movement of Symphony No. 8, you might hear a "blue" note or two — the musical twinkle in Dvorak's eye that would someday be heard again in American jazz, gospel, and blues music.

The ESO presents two more performances of "Don Juan and Dvorak," Saturday, March 5th at 8:00 pm and Sunday, March 6th at 3:30 pm. Tickets are still available online at www.elginsymphony.org or call the Box Office at (847) 888-4000.

Dvorak: Suite in A Major ("American")

A little unlike many of history’s great composers, this innkeeper’s son from a rural Czechoslovakian village was not necessarily a child prodigy. While some biographers claim he became a butcher’s apprentice at his parents’ insistence, he nonetheless received modest training in organ, violin and viola which prepared him for his first job as a member of a dance orchestra in the capital city. In 1862, this ensemble formed the foundation for the newly created Prague Provisional Theater Orchestra, and during the next nine years as a member, Dvorak gained a broad exposure to the operatic works of Wagner, Verdi and Mozart. He also began work on some of his own first large scale compositions.

In his early thirties, Dvorak caught the attention of Brahms and his friend, the famous Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, with his entries in the annual Austrian state composition contests. Eventually, Brahms’ influence with his German publishers made possible the 1878 release of Dvorak’s first set of Slavonic Dances, whose broad appeal soon brought him international acclaim. For the next fifteen years, his fame and fortune would continue to rise through numerous commissions and conducting appearances throughout Europe, notably many in England.

He accepted a position as Director of the National Conservatory of Music in America (New York) in 1892, and thus began a fertile three-year period of creativity that produced his famous Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”), which premiered in the Spring of 1894. Dvorak spent the following summer in the Czech-speaking community of Spillville, Iowa, where he finished his lesser known Suite in A Major, first written for solo piano and scored for orchestra in the following year.

Its five movements convey a wide range of moods, including hints of homesickness for his native Czechoslovakia in the folksy strains throughout the work; a loving embrace of the Native American and Afro-American idioms he was hearing anew on the prairie; and even a foreshadowing of the Humoresques he was to write a year later. Though Dvorak later felt his greatest contributions were to European opera, his American-period synthesis of dance rhythms, five-tone folk melodies, and tuneful phrasing had a profound influence on American music, right into the jazz age.