Reviews
ASO all over the map, in a good way
By JOSEPH DALTON, Special to the Times Union
First published: Sunday, October 28, 2007
review ALBANY -- China by way of Germany with a long final stopover in a land of hallucination. That was the itinerary for Saturday night's gala concert at the Palace Theatre of the Albany Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Alan Miller.
The program's centerpiece was the "Butterfly Lovers" concerto by Gang Chen and Zhan-Hao He, with soloist Betti Xiang playing the erhu, a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument. When it premiered in 1958, the concerto touched a chord in China that continues to vibrate. Its story is about the ill-fated love shared by two youngsters, but the piece resounds with a triumphant nationalistic spirit.
Stylistically, the "Butterfly Lovers" was a prototype of the East-West musical fusion that continues to fascinate composers. There is an unmistakable Asian sound and a secure grasp of Western orchestration. But the piece also draws heavily on orchestral cliches that were long ago relegated mostly to the realm of film scores. Big melodies are reprised again and again, and the ASO delivered them with dignity and confidence.
By inviting a soloist to perform on the erhu, rather than the violin for which the concerto was originally scored, Miller added some fresh color and even a bit of fascination to the performance. Xiang plays with a tone that can be sweet and singing or fierce and impassioned, and it arrives as if by magic from an instrument that at a distance appears to be little more than two crossed sticks resting on a little box.
A native of Shanghai and an American resident since 1996, Xiang has performed with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and last year she and Miller gave the "Butterfly Lovers" in a subscription program of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her brief encore Saturday included a few tapped rhythms on the instrument's body and was as clever and enjoyable as anything in the preceding concerto.
Masterpieces well executed and faithfully interpreted made up the balance of the program. In a switch, the brass didn't have to wait until the night's end for their hard work. In Wagner's "Tannhauser" overture, which opened the program, they grew from a near whisper to a mighty roar.
After intermission, Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique" was a searing emotional journey. The highlights, as usual, came at the end, with the bloody "March to the Scaffold" and chilly "Dream of the Witches," surely a nod to the Halloween season.
Blockbuster' opener is rainy CSO triumph
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic
Published September 15, 2006
Star-crossed lovers became storm-tossed lovers Wednesday at Millennium Park, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented the first of two free "Blockbuster Week" concerts.
A program built around real and fictional figures unlucky in love had the ill luck of being performed under a cold, misting rain that didn't clear up until the event was over. But the CSO soldiered bravely onward.
An estimated 2,500 listeners turned out as the CSO previewed Symphony Center's season long contributions to Silk Road Chicago, a citywide celebration of music and art spearheaded by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. David Alan Miller conducted Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Overture-Fantasy and Berlioz's "Symphonies Fantastique," but the only true cross-cultural event was a Chinese classical piece, "The Butterfly Lovers."
The violin concerto was composed in 1957 by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, two composition students at the Shanghai Conservatory. It is a musical retelling of an ancient Chinese folk tale about thwarted lovers who find peace and happiness only in death, when they turn into a pair of butterflies.
Western and Eastern musical elements merge with a naivete and sophistication that make the three-part work so sweetly appealing. The solo part, played here on the two-string Chinese fiddle known as the erhu, borrows its sliding melodic intervals from Shanghai opera, its techniques from standard Western concertos. The lush scoring, simple harmonies and obvious pictorial effects often give it the feel of romantic movie music.
The Chinese erhu virtuosa Betti Xiang was the astonishing soloist. She "sang" the female half of the doomed couple with an agility, subtlety and lyrical grace any opera singer would envy. The erhu is played like a cello, but in Xiang's sensitive hands, it could soar with a violin's range and color, or skitter like a stone thrown across a rushing stream. The orchestra handled the pretty accompaniment, well, prettily.
Miller, a familiar figure to Ravinia audiences but not to downtown, led a lyrical and dramatic account of the Tchaikovsky tone poem. Alas, what emerged from the amplification was a rather pale and tubby reflection of what the CSO can achieve in Romantic warhorses such as this.
The Berlioz was unexceptional for its first four movements but came alive (as so many "Fantastiques" do) in the final "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath," complete with ominous offstage chimes, sardonic wails from the high clarinet and macabre chatterings from the violinists' bows.
CSO weaves a tapestry of sounds - concert review CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at the Pritzker Pavilion
by Marta Tonegutti
Chicago Sun-times Friday, September 15, 2006
A fine tapestry of sounds and colors was woven Wednesday night by the musician of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by David Alan Miller in a special appearance at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
As the first of two free outdoor concerts that conclude Millennium Park's Blockbuster Week and continue the yearlong Silk Road Chicago celebration, the event drew an enthusiastic audience, who braved the inclement weather to hear the CSO and guest soloist Betti Xiang, performing on the erhu, a traditional two-string Chinese fiddle.
The program, skillfully attuned to the occasion, featured the signature mixing of Eastern and Western influences of the Silk Road, made here particularly relevant by the presence of the 1959 concerto "The Butterfly Lovers" by Chinese composers Chen Gang and He Zhanhao. Inspired by a centuries-old Chinese romantic folk tale, it's a work as popular in its home country as it is virtually unknown here.
The program also included two beloved titles of the Western classical music canon, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" overture and Berlioz"s "Symphonie fantastique," which were rescued from their hyper-familiarity and usual blockbuster effect by the crisp, unsentimental reading offered by these superb musicians and Miller, a conduct er familiar with the probing intricacies as well as the eclecticism of modern and contemporary music. He successfully applied the same clarity, rigor and freshness of thought to these quintessential Romantic pieces.
Tchaikovsky's overture set the tone, with Miller's intense but precise gestures guiding and containing the swelling of the orchestral sound in beautifully molded melodic phrases and cleanly shaped rhythmic patterns, which exposed the music's harmonic richness and made it all the more effective.
Despite the problems posed by the use of outdoor amplification, which inevitably creates an altered and disembodied orchestral sound even for listeners in the pavilion, Miller used the full dynamic palette well, summoning delicate pianissimos and well-balanced crescendos of the work's familiar"love theme" toward the organ-like sonorities of the finale.
A radiant Xiang took center stage for "The Butterfly Lovers," claiming for her erhu the part originally composed for violin in imitation of the traditional Chinese fiddle. She mesmerized the audience as much with her virtuoso performance as with the instrument's plaintive voice-like quality, familiar to us through chinese opera and now through cinema.
What came to life in the riveting dialogue between soloist and orchestra was a continuous piece of music in three long sections, compellingly infusing the Western symphonic forms with the Eastern sonorities of the pentatonic scale, and with highly expressive musical gestures derived from the Chinese operatic tradition.
A demanding cadenza for the solo erhu was beautifully executed, as were the melancholy exchanges between erhu and first cello, with the two instruments giving voice to the tale's unhappy lovers.
The second part of the program, devoted to Berlioz's expansive symphony, was as successful. Again, the amplification made it arduous to listen for nuances of sound and interpretation, but what came through was never the less eloquently satisfying. The piece served naturally as a showcase for CSO's impressive principal players, and for the whole woodwind, brass, and percussion sections.
Miller and the CSO made sure, however, that nothing got lost of Berlioz's inventive dramatic construction and colorful harmonies and orchestration, attacking each of the five sections with renewed energy and precision, and bringing the work, after the frenzied witched's dance, to a majestic close.
Let's rejoice, then, in a new CSO season that promises as much fantasy in its programming as it does in its mastery of musical execution.
