Yesterday afternoon was my first opportunity of the season to catch up with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Youth Orchestra led by Wattis Foundation Music Director Radu Paponiu. The program was an engagingly diverse one with major selections by both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss, each of which was paired with a more recent work by Gabriela Lena Frank and Arturo Márquez, respectively. Paponiu led with a solid command of the full breadth of diversity offered by this repertoire, and all the members of his ensemble came across as well-tuned to his every gesture.
“Marriage à-la-mode: The Countess's Morning Levee,” a painting by William Hogarth that may have inspired the first act of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Mozart led the way with his K. 385 (“Haffner”) symphony in D major. This was given a vigorous delivery under Paponiu’s baton, introducing the ensemble with a dazzling account of the clarity in their “musical diction.” This was complemented in the second half of the program by a suite of instrumental excerpts from Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier. As an opera-goer, I have long appreciated the role that this music played in the unfolding of the narrative; but that narrative was left by the wayside in the suite that Strauss extracted. Nevertheless, the performance evoked my own personal memories of the Marschallin, Octavian, and Baron Ochs, even without much sense of the story that unfolded.
The Frank and Márquez selections were both “first encounters,” although I had listened to other Frank works over the last few decades. Each of these new encounters offered its own technique on Latin rhetoric, and both were equally engaging. However, I must confess that I was particularly impressed by Márquez leaving it to the violas to take the lead on the primary theme! This was his second “Danzón” composition, completed in 1994; and the performance convinced me that his repertoire deserves more attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment