Friday evening’s Toledo Symphony Masterworks Concert, a survey of the concerto in all its various guises, read like a casting call for the Clash of the Titans. Three works requiring epic virtuosity on the part of all involved formed the program; Music Director Alain Trudel conducted.
In another installment in the game of orchestral ping-pong, Trudel again moved the seating of the orchestra members; this time choosing traditional string seating, although the brass still remained split across the stage.
One begins to wonder if the lack of exact precision and slightly less than sparkling sound characteristic of a couple seasons past are the result of this continual game of musical chairs. Indeed, the evening was an uneven venture with moments of sublime delicacy juxtaposed against wandering, aimless musical phrases rife with precision and tuning problems.
Principal violinist Kirk Toth opened in Francesco Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso in G minor, which featured an ensemble of strings, assisted by the continuo of harpsichordist Valrie Kantorski.
The work was given a messy reading. Toth handled the solo gymnastics with his usual precision and stylistic aplomb, but the underlying support laid by Trudel was riddled with imprecision, intonation, and accuracy problems.
Bowling Green alumna and Pulitizer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon’s five-movement Concerto for Orchestra followed. A colorfully explorative work, orchestra members handled the inhuman technical demands astoundingly.
Though complex, the piece is accessible for the listener, though slightly longer than it really needs to be. Utilizing a continually changing sonic landscape, labyrinthine in structure, it is still evocative and inviting to the ear.
The first movement was marred by Trudel’s not marking a clear melodic path and musical intention that was so obviously apparent in the rest of the work. The result was a mass of garbled lines lost in a morass of notes.
In contrast, the precision and expertise of the strings during the dance-like second movement and the crystalline clarity of the wind soloists during the third were particularly memorable.
The true joy of the piece, however, was the panoply of the orchestra percussion crowning the fourth and fifth movements. These often-unsung heroes rose to the amazing sonic demands in an astounding whirl of changing instruments that was Parnassus.
Closing the evening, Van Cliburn-winning pianist Olga Kern tackled the monstrous Rachmaninoff Concerto no. 3. To put it simply: she was a Russian playing Russian, as quintessential as beluga caviar and sour cream on toast points — a recipe for absolute perfection.
She was indeed. Passionate soaring lines, thunderous roaring chordal passages, delicately shaped melodies, Kern imbued the work with a richly sensitive musical palette belying a deep understanding of the composer’s music beyond the surface show of acrobatic gymnastics.
The orchestral underscore, however, so obviously exhausted by the demands of the Higdon, again was uneven, suffering in intonation, precision, and balance of lines — more the fault of the programming than their own abilities.
The concert will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday in the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, 2445 Monroe St., Toledo. Tickets and more information are available at 419-246-8000 or toledosymphony.com.
Contact Wayne F. Anthony at classics@theblade.com.
First Published January 18, 2020, 4:18 a.m.
