Review: Symphony 'Rush Hour'
Steven Smith conducting
Oct. 4, Richmond CenterStage
The Richmond Symphony’s new casual-concert series got off to a splendid start musically, a fair-to-middling start logistically. “Rush Hour” concerts – another is scheduled for Feb. 21 – are short programs (an hour or so) of music with talk about it. A free beverage comes with a ticket. The event was staged in Richmond CenterStage’s Gottwald Playhouse, a “black box” theater (only earth-toned) seating about 200.
Steven Smith, the symphony’s music director, did most of the talking, in much the same way that he conducts pre-concert lectures for the Masterworks series. Smith was engaging, informed and cogent in introducing the program’s three selections; before the longest, Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, he invited the featured soloists to have their say.
Joseph Evans, a Houston-based tenor and university teacher, and James Ferree, who joined the symphony as principal horn player in January, gave smoothly delivered talks, Evans focusing on the text of the Britten (complete with translations from 15th century English), Ferree demonstrating the natural horn, the valveless predecessor to the modern French horn, which Britten uses to haunting effect in the prologue and epilogue of the serenade.
Evans has a near-ideal voice for Britten’s settings of Tennyson, Blake, Keats, two other English poets and the 15th-century “Lyke Wake Dirge.” The composer wrote the vocal part of the serenade for tenor Peter Pears, whose rather steely head voice could penetrate complex and unquiet orchestrations. Evans added just enough metal to be heard clearly alongside robust, sonorous playing by Ferree and the symphony strings.
The program opened with Zoltan Kodály’s “Summer Evening,” a late-romantic/impressionistic tone poem liberally garnished with the harmonies and rhythmic inflections of Hungarian folk song and dance. The piece, which sounds like a Hungarian analogue to music of the English pastoral school (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Butterworth, etc.), was a surprisingly suitable companion to the Britten.
Smith and the orchestra concluded the mini-concert with the first movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 in B flat major, one of the 12 “London” symphonies that the composer wrote for two tours of England in the 1790s. This was a semi-“big band” reading of Haydn, with moderate tempos and blunt accents.
If conversation and audience interaction are to be part of these events, the Gottwald Playhouse is not the ideal venue. The space is intimate, with surprisingly lively acoustics; but the formal-concert "wall" between performers and listeners still stands in this largely fixed-seat space.
The program will be repeated, with a full performance of the Haydn symphony, in the opening of the orchestra’s Metro Collection series, at 3 p.m. Oct. 7 at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. Tickets: $20. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); www.richmondsymphony.com
