Boca Symphonia Persuasive in Britten, Dvorak and Mendelssohn
Boca Symphonia Persuasive in Britten, Dvorak and Mendelssohn
By Greg Stepanich
When an orchestra wants to introduce its audience to unfamiliar repertoire, the time-honored pattern is usually to offer only one such piece and leave the rest to the workhorses.
But on Sunday afternoon at the Roberts Theater, the Boca Raton Symphonia made the case for two overlooked, rarely played works, and those arguments were more than persuasive. That these overdue introductions occurred on a program that also featured a charismatic piano soloist made the concert satisfying on a number of levels from the visceral to the rigorously intellectual.
That soloist was the fine American pianist Frederic Chiu, who appeared in what conductor Alexander Platt called the "eternally youthful" First Piano Concerto (in G minor, Op. 25) of Felix Mendelssohn, whose birth bicentenary is being widely celebrated this year. In Chiu's reading, this is a lightly framed work, but by no means lightweight; it is, rather, lean and muscular.
Chiu has a big sound and commanding technique to which he brought a high level of seriousness about Mendelssohn's writing. The transitional solo that connects the first and second movements, for instance, was slow, dark and mournfully ruminative, a bit of somber reflection that did a beautiful job of setting up the opening theme of the Andante, played radiantly here by the Boca Symphonia cellos.
The six-note secondary theme of the first movement (it returns briefly in the finale) also received the poetic treatment, as Chiu gave it a special level of intensity and feeling that sharpened the contrast with the concerto's frequent top-of-the-register sparkle, making it sound bubbly thereby, and not showy. The Boca orchestra and Platt were fine partners with Chiu (save for an out-of-tune horn in the slow movement), accompanying with sensitivity and a palpable shared sense of fun.
Chiu played a solo encore, the Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14, of Mendelssohn, a substantial work written a year earlier than the concerto and containing much the same mix of Romantic yearning and virtuosic frippery. The solo format allowed the audience to hear very clearly Chiu's excellent sense of control as he tossed off the Rondo's main theme, one of those bits of elfin music that came so naturally to the composer and which have helped define him.
Here, too, Chiu made the contrast between the fluttering main theme and the more ardent secondary theme very dramatic, but he overdid it a bit, giving Mendelssohn's carefully structured work the sound of pieces that were intriguing in themselves but didn't belong together in the same work. Still, Chiu produced an impressive display of pianism overall, and one that added a good deal of power to music that often gets played with more restraint.
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Jan 12, 2009
