Symphony orchestra off to promising start
Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"
Schumann: Piano Concerto
Alicia de Larrocha, PianistCONCERT REVIEW
By William Glackin
Sacramento Bee Critic at Large
Sacramento has a full-size professional symphony orchestra in the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra. And judging by the ovation it received in the Community Center Theater Friday night in the first of two weekend concerts, it has a fighting chance for long-term success.
That will depend on a lot of things, of course, not least the ability to raise money and also win back those local symphony fans still disaffected by the bankruptcy of the late Sacramento Symphony.
But the first thing you have to do to win hearts is assemble the talent and play the music, and that's what conductor and music director Zvonimir Hacko did, to the evident satisfaction of an audience of about 1,000 Friday night. For a new orchestra the big ensemble had surprising coherence and unity, and it responded with notable fidelity to the commands of its leader, who has a dynamic conducting style that was effective in quiet passages as well as the big climaxes.
The music he chose is full of these contrasts, particularly the Tchaikovsky "1812" Overture which began the concert and the Dvorak's Ninth Symphony ("From the New World") which ended it. Swinging back and forth from intensely soft or lyric to all-out emotional, the performances held the attention and created the kind of excitement that brings audiences to their feet.
As for winning hearts and ovations, the venerable and remarkable Alicia de Larrocha, playing the Schumann Piano Concerto, gave still further lessons in how to do it.
De Larrocha is 74 but the kind of player who makes age irrelevant. Short of stature, radiating poise and scorning any kind of flamboyance, she gives the impression of being totally committed to the music. She can handle all the passage work with a smoothness that belies effort; she can strike the keyboard with the power that Schumann requests. Beyond those elementary requirements, she is eloquently able to convey the beauty and feeling that lie in this masterwork.
It's a wonderful concerto. The first movement, first invented as an independent fantasy, is overflowing with ideas, and culminates in a very big cadenza. In the second, in tones of a light, pretty song, the orchestra and the pianist share the singing like twins completing each other's sentences. (Hacko kept the orchestra notably light). The third is a Rondo that goes on as if it never wants to stop. The performance won shouts and whistles.
Dvorak's Ninth is full of strokes of drama, to which Hacko's own style - often big and excited - is aptly suited. But the famous song of the second movement, marked "Largo," was reverently slow, which made the stops in its final measures the more arresting. The third starts with a bang and alternates jauntiness with lyricism; the fourth is dominated by a thrilling opening horn theme, but it, too, has time for quieter singing. The orchestra managed all these alternations with an execution that was impressively together. And the conductor's finishing gesture, which rounded out the horn theme to a quiet resolution, was a neatly visual stroke of theater.