Once again, my wife and I settled down to dinner yesterday while watching the latest “free live HD webcast” presented by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) conducted by Jader Bignamini. Since I seem to receive a steady stream of electronic mail from DSO, I am almost certain that this was the first livestream of the new season. The program was structured around two highly-contrasting compositions.
The first of these was Wynton Marsalis’ four-movement violin concerto in D major, given its world premiere by British violinist Nicola Benedetti in November of 2015, performing with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan. Last night’s violin soloist was Giuseppe Gibboni, who took an encore performance of Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” which may have been his own solo arrangement of music composed originally for guitar. The intermission was followed by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 70, his ninth symphony. Curiously, this also received its first performance in November; but this time it was in 1945! This, too, was coupled with an encore, the “Russian Sailors Dance” from Reinhold Glière’s music for the ballet The Red Poppy.
Violinist Gibboni “jamming” with drummer Becker (screen shot from last night’s YouTube video of the webcast)
Decca released a recording of Benedetti playing the Marsalis concerto in the summer of 2019. My account of it was not particularly enthusiastic, and I had pretty much forgotten about it until I began to prepare background material for writing this article! To some extent, watching the performance made the music at least a bit more palatable. Indeed, the third movement included a duet for violin and drum kit; and I was delighted to see Gibboni leave his front-and-center position to wander over to the side of the stage where drummer Joseph Becker had set up his kit. They may not have been “jamming,” but the duo work marked a high point of spontaneity!
Those high spirits spilled over the intermission into Bignamini’s “Russian half.” Shostakovich tended to be consistently good at making sure that all of the members of the orchestra were satisfied with their parts. I am afraid that the camera work could not always keep up with his pace in bouncing themes from one instrument to another; but, for the most part, the video work allowed the attentive listener to follow most of the details. There was similar diversity in the Glière account, which was basically instrumental variations on a basic theme. The variations were not particularly imaginative, meaning that the viewing tended to be more engaging than the listening (as often tends to be the case with ballet)!
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