It seems as if every time I write about Stella Chen involves some new form of debut experience. Her very first professional appearance in San Francisco took place in March of 2023, a little over a week after the release of her debut album Stella x Schubert. She was accompanied at the piano by Henry Kramer in a program prepared for Chamber Music San Francisco. She returned a little over a year later to make her debut in Davies Symphony Hall, this time with pianist George Li for the final recital in the Shenson Spotlight Series.
Last night Chen returned to Davies, this time making her debut as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Her selection was Samuel Barber’s only violin concerto, his Opus 14 completed in 1939. The conductor for this occasion was Earl Lee.
This was the second of the two classical concerts prepared for this season’s Summer with the Symphony programming. Lee followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony guidelines. The Barber concerto has been absent from Davies since Gil Shaham played it with SFS in March of 2017. During the second half of the twentieth century, Barber was regarded as a composer best forgotten; but now that we have emerged from the “new for the sake of new” conceits of that past half-century, there is much for the attentive listener to appreciate in this violin concerto.
Barber was never shy in summoning up rich orchestral resources. Fortunately, between Lee’s sense of balance and Chen’s fearless command of the composer’s virtuoso passages, this was very much an engaging account of the relationship between solo and ensemble. Indeed, the number of brief passages for ensemble soloists was a generous one. The violinist is thus situated in a vast landscape of diverse sonorities. Nevertheless, in Chen’s hands, the solo voice held its own, even when surrounded by the riches of Barber’s instrumental landscapes.
Mind you, those landscapes were just as rich after the intermission, when Lee led the full ensemble in a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor. This is Tchaikovsky at his most dramatic without setting a narrative for a ballet or an opera. The entire symphony is structure around the opening “Fate” motif, which winds its way in and out of all the other thematic material for the four movements. The most lyrical of these was the oboe solo at the beginning of the second (Andantino in modo de canzona) movement; and Lee was one of those conductors who knew how to restrain his baton while Russ de Luna provided a ravishing account of the theme.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s autograph of the sonata movement played by Chen for her encore (public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)
On the more modest side, Chen followed her concerto debut with an encore. As is so often the case with so many violin encores, she turned to the sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. More specifically, she “began at the beginning,” so to speak, playing the Adagio movement that begins the BWV 1001 sonata in G minor. When approached with the right dispositions, this music reveals itself more as sinuously tempting than as mere abstraction; and Chen knew just how to capture and convey those dispositions. In many ways, that music had more to say in a few minutes than Tchaikovsky could deliver over the course of an hour!
Less convincing was the “overture” for the evening. “Fate Now Conquers” was composed by Carlos Simon for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which gave the premiere performance in October of 2020. (This was during the celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday.) The title, however, was taken from Homer’s Iliad. Apparently, Beethoven had entered into his journal a passage from Homer, whose first words were those that Simon selected for his title. Sadly, there was little in Simon’s meandering score to evoke either Homer or Beethoven; and the music’s greatest virtue was being limited to five minutes in duration.
No comments:
Post a Comment