By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — Waiting until the hall was pin-drop silent, German guest conductor for the March 6 concert, Matthias Pintscher, quietly signaled the San Diego Symphony Orchestra to begin sounding the impressionist magic of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite.
The opening “Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty,” began with delicate flutes, accompanied by the harp; a beautiful English horn solo was heard during “Tom Thumb;” xylophone and gong punctuated the pentatonic scales of the “Empress of the Pagodas;” the contrabassoon represented one of the characters in “Conversations of Beauty and the Beast;” and “The Enchanted Garden,” had hazy-sounding strings emerging from the clouds.
For a decade, Pintscher served as conductor of the Paris-based Ensemble of Contemporary music, founded by Pierre Boulez, so it is no wonder that the 54-year-old maestro knew how to evoke the French impressionism of Ravel’s music.
Matthias Pintscher has recently become the Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. His conducting style harkens back to the legacy of the great 19th century conductor, Arthur Nikisch, who led with a thorough knowledge of the score, an economy of motion, and communicated a great deal with eye contact. Nikisch was the legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and the Boston Symphony. He taught and influenced conductors such as Fritz Reiner and Wilhelm Feuchtwanger. Nikisch’s assistant, Richard Lert, came to the United States before World War II and, under the auspices of the American Symphony Orchestra League, taught several generations of American conductors.
Following the Ravel piece was Bartok’s passionate Violin Concerto #2 . Violinist Alexi Kenny, born in Palo Alto, California, attacked the work with every fiber of his body. Nearly every bow stroke was accompanied by lunges, crouching or twisting, as if he were engaged in battle with the score.
As a nonagenarian, I still remember the stances of violinists such as Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin and Joseph Szegheti, where the passion came through in their fingers, not in physical gyrations. I wonder whether this physicality, present in many of the younger generation of classical music performers, is influenced by the choreography of rock stars.
When I closed my eyes and listened, I realized Kenny was delivering a magnificent interpretation of Bartok’s dramatic work, a work filled with Hungarian folk idioms and virtuosic hurdles.
The second movement of the concerto is a theme with six variations, and the final movement is actually a dance-like variation of the first movement. The young virtuoso tossed off the last movement with great bravado.
Thirty-one-year-old Kenny is a graduate of the New England Conservatory, where his teachers were Miriam Fried and Donald Weilerstein, father of cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who will be the soloist with the SDSO at the May 10 and 11 programs. Kenny was the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.
The final work of the March 6 concert was the last composition by Russian-born composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, his Symphonic Dances. Although composed at a time when Rachmaninoff’s health was waning, he infused the work with powerful energy and innovative sonorities.
The first movement included an alto saxophone solo; the second movement featured muted brass; and the final movement had bells sounding, one of Rachmaninoff s trademarks, as well as the insertion of the Dies Irae from the Catholic Mass as it rushed to its glorious climactic ending.
Once again, the acoustics of the renovated Jacobs Music Center makes listening to our San Diego Symphony a most pleasurable experience.
If you have not yet attended a symphony concert in the newly renovated Jacobs Music Center, five more classical programs remain this season:
–March 29 and 30 Grieg Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky Symphony #4, Gareth Farr “The invocation of the Sea.”
–May 3 and 4, Smetana “Overture and Three Dances” from The Bartered Bride, Yoshimatsu Soprano Saxophone Concerto, Dvorak Symphony No. 8.
–May 10 and 11, Unsuk Chin Cello Concerto, Bruckner Symphony #7; May 16 and 17, Saint-Saens Piano Concerto #3, Shostakovitch Symphony #7.
May 23, 24 and 25, Mahler Symphony #3.
*
Eileen Wingard, a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony, is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.