CSO's "In Your School" Concert One of the Most Important of the Season
A pair of youngsters in front of me jumped when Paavo Järvi
loosed the sudden fortissimo that opens the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s
Symphony No. 4 Tuesday evening at Princeton High School in Springdale.
The whole audience jumped at the symphony's blazing, fortiss-iss-imo
conclusion. Jumped to their feet, that is, to shower Järvi and the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra with a whistling, cheering ovation.
It was one of the most important concerts of the CSO season, part of the CSO's “In Your School” education and outreach program designed to benefit music education and instrumental music programs in Greater Cincinnati schools.
Princeton High School’s Matthews Auditorium, which seats about 1,000, was nearly full for the concert, including students, parents, well-wishers and area residents.
The concert was the culminating event in a kind of “mini-residency,”
whereby CSO ensembles visited and performed in elementary schools in the
Princeton City School District, and CSO players provided coaching for Princeton
High School musicians. Coaches/CSO violinists
Kathy Lange-Jensen and Stacey Woolley, violist Joanne Wojtowicz and cellist
Alan Rafferty sat in with the Princeton High School Orchestra in the opening
selection on the concert, “Frolicsome Finale” from Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony,
led by CSO assistant conductor Ken Lam.
The spirited work showed that there is muscle in more than the athletic
programs at Princeton, with the young string players fielding a healthy, vivacious sound.
Järvi chose the program wisely for this “In School” concert, with a star soloist, CSO principal trumpeter Robert Sullivan, a contemporary work and a universal favorite. He opened with a 1976 work by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that skates the divide between old and new brilliantly, “Wenn Bach Bienen Gezüchtet hätte” (“If Bach had raised bees . . .”). That’s Bach as in Johann Sebastian Bach, whom Pärt consulted deeply as he was evolving his compositional style. This is one of his so-called “collage” works, written before he adopted the “mystical minimalist” style for which he is best known today.
You can hear beautiful Bachian melody here (principal oboist Dwight Parry in the second movement Sarabande), “tone-painting” as the strings emulate the buzzing of bees, and “stinging” harmonic effects that ultimately resolve on a gentle major chord. All in all, it is music that is comprehensible, challenging and reaches out to audiences skittish about “modern” music.
Sullivan, CSO principal trumpet since 2008, has been treating
Music Hall audiences for two seasons now with his distinctive
golden sound emanating from from the back of the wind section. He did so out in front in Matthews Auditorium in the
Trumpet Concerto in E-flat Major by Johann Hummel (a contemporary of Beethoven
who wrote in the style of Haydn and Mozart.)
It was a chance to just bask in Sullivan’s long lines, shaped just-so
and often with considerable subtlety. The lovely, aria-like slow movement caressed
the ear, and the galloping finale was pure delight, with Sullivan’s super-precise
tonguing and glossy tone.
Sullivan joined the rest of the CSO brasses in the arresting F-minor “fate” motif that opens Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. The audience was totally engaged by this popular work, which they applauded after each movement – which was no problem at all and even gave Järvi the opportunity to cast an impish smile at the audience after a bit of premature applause during the finale. I hope the middle-schooler I met at intermission -- a trombonist who said she chose the trombone over the trumpet because she is left-handed -- relished the majestic trombone sound in the outer movements, and that everyone was overwhelmed by principal flutist Randolph Bowman’s one-of-a-kind sweet tone throughout.
Järvi, who loves to conduct, put some of his best work into this performance, perhaps taking his players by surprise now and then by doing something different and injecting a feeling of spontaneity into the music. There were moments of aching beauty, as in the slow movement where the strings joined principal bassoonist William Winstead in an extremely touching re-statement of the plaintive opening theme.
Järvi made sheer fun of the pizzicato Scherzo, where he laid down his baton (as the string players do their bows) and shaped it with his hands, then picked it up again to conduct the flight-of-fancy Trio for winds. He pulled out all the stops in the finale, which he built to a fever pitch, giving the Princeton audience no choice but to succumb and make their way down to Music Hall for more of the same. They were given directions, perhaps, at the post-concert reception where they were invited to meet Järvi and the CSO players.