In Performance: Castleton Finale
Web-only review:
by Joan Reinthaler
The inaugural season of the Castleton Festival, conductor Lorin Maazel’s gift to aspiring young musicians and to Virginia’s Rappahannock Valley, closed on Sunday with a spirited concert by the festival’s orchestra. In an air-conditioned tent packed to the gills with the young instrumentalists, an overflowing audience and one enthusiastic tree frog, Maazel led an interesting mix of young musicians in a program eminently suited to quick team-building – the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations and the Overture to Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” Conducting Associates Andreas Weiser and Timothy Myers took on, in turn, the Grieg A Minor Piano Concerto and Britten’s “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra," fine showcases for every section of the orchestra.
(read more after the jump)
The 75 members of the orchestra reflect some of the influence that Maazel (recently retired as music director of the New York Philharmonic) exerts world-wide. Twenty-five were from Charlottesville High School, four from the Royal College of Music in London and eleven from the Qatar Philharmonic (whose inaugural concert last fall Maazel conducted). The rest applied and auditioned on an individual basis. And while there were occasional ensemble problems, tentative entrances and skewed balances, on the whole they played well and, occasionally, passionately (particularly in the Britten).
As the soloist in the Tchaikovsky, cellist Han-Na Chang handled the evolving personalities of the variations with imagination and a degree of pizzazz that sometimes missed its aim but, most of the time, was exciting and on the mark. The Grieg got an amazingly mature reading by pianist Seongjin Cho, 15 years old and already armed with a resume of competitions that someone twice his age might kill for. His pianism was as impressive for its carefully balanced quiet sonorities as it was for its rhythmic integrity but it would be good if he could rein in some of the showy mannerisms that punctuated the ends of phrases.
This tent is really small for an orchestra as large as this one and the sound emerges hot-off-the-grill, without the blending that a little distance accomplishes. The flip side is the chance to watch Maazel at such close range – a rare treat.
-- Joan Reinthaler
By
Anne Midgette
|
July 21, 2009; 6:32 AM ET
| Category:
festivals
,
local reviews
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