Review: Richmond Symphony

with violinist Karen Johnson
May 18, Second Baptist Church, Richmond

Karen Johnson, the Richmond Symphony’s concertmaster, was a young Arizona teenager when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Nothing in her biography suggests that she would have much insight into that totalitarian state’s impact on the psychology of its artists. Yet she shows complete command of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, one of the great musical echoes of life and art under the Soviet regime at its most oppressive.

Shostakovich wrote the concerto in the late 1940s, during the final years of Josef Stalin’s brutal, paranoid dictatorship, when the composer endured official censure for the crime of "formalism," or creating artwork that failed to celebrate the Soviet state or promote its ideology. That offense is compounded in this piece by its evocation of Jewish themes and styles, at a time when anti-Semitism was the semiofficial stance of the regime. The composer kept the concerto "in the drawer" until Stalin was dead; its premiere in 1955, with David Oistrakh as soloist, was one of the first signs of a post-Stalinist cultural "thaw."

Johnson’s May 18 performance was deeply attuned, on several levels, to the historical, artistic and spiritual contexts of this work. She played lyrical sections as tragic but stoical soliloquies, gave more aggressive passages an undertone of giddy fatalism and barely concealed terror; every phrase and gesture had a sharp edge yet also conveyed ominous suggestiveness.

Johnson and conductor Mark Russell Smith positioned the violin solo in the near-foreground of the sound picture – appropriate placement in what is often described as a symphony for violin and orchestra.

The violinist sustained the essentially dark tone that Shostakovich gives the instrument, complementing the throaty voice of an orchestration full of low-register woodwinds and brass. Episodes of tonal brilliance struck the appropriate contrast, and showed off Johnson’s impressive technique; but when speaking to the musical essence of the piece – in the opening nocturne, the central passacaglia and subsequent cadenza – her voice was deep, moody and idiomatically Russian.

The orchestra’s final subscription concert of the season is also James Erb’s last as director of the Richmond Symphony Chorus. He prepared the women of the chorus for "Sirènes," the finale of Debussy’s Nocturnes. The positioning of the singers, in three groups on- and offstage, accented the exchanges among the voices and gave the chorus a more spatial quality than one commonly hears.

Smith balanced voices and orchestra nicely, and generally maintained balances among orchestral sections – not an easy feat in the intricate play of tone colors and dynamics in the central "Fétes." The horn section was in excellent form in "Fétes," and Kyle Mustain’s English horn was a richly evocative voice in the opening "Nuages."

After an opening half of tonal ambiguities and moody undertones, Richard Strauss’ orchestral suite from his opera "Der Rosenkavalier" is a late-romantic blowout, an extravaganza of creamy string tone garnished with glittering winds and percussion in broadly inflected Viennese waltzes and bittersweet arias and ensembles. Smith and the orchestra made the most of its colorful theatricality.

The program repeats at 8 p.m. May 19 at First Baptist Church, Boulevard at Monument Avenue in Richmond, and 8 p.m. May 21 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 4491 Springfield Road in Glen Allen. Tickets: $20-$60. Information: (804) 788-1212 or www.richmondsymphony.com

The May 21 performance airs live on WCVE (88.9 FM) in Richmond and WCNV (89.1 FM) in Heathsville.