Written by Bill Hemminger

A more varied program could not have been imagined—from Schubert’s delightful Overture to Rosamunde (which appeared on that first EPO program 90 years ago), to a heart-rending 2018 concerto for violin featuring internationally-acclaimed soloist Anne Akiko Meyers, and then to Tchaikovsky’s blockbuster Symphony No. 4—this evening displayed the EPO at its absolute musical best under the masterful leadership of Roger Kalia.   The Victory Theatre may still be echoing the thunderous ovation in response to the unequivocally hopeful conclusion of Tchaikovsky’s work.

This concert truly featured the best of all musical contributors to the EPO.  Rosamunde displayed the right combination of somewhat-sinister moods to light, almost comical, touches from the strings.   Kalia’s conducting patterns shaped the phrases for those of us in the audience, and he kept the overture within the appropriate frame of a late-classical work.  

The violin concerto, entitled Orchard in Fog, created a mesmerizing landscape of sound.   That fog was intensified by the plangent violin score, particularly in the first movement.  Akiko Meyers’ playing sang through the fog—which lifted in the second movement, a lively dance.  The third movement opened with a quotation from Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and the mood of the concerto returned to pensive but not bleak.  The composition concluded quietly as scalar patterns ascended and then disappeared.  Silence in the hall:  then warm audience appreciation for the work and its stunning delivery.

The Tchaikovsky symphony—all 40+ minutes of it—filled the second half of the concert.  I cannot imagine a more challenging assignment for any orchestra. The super-charged first movement features brass and horn choirs as it proclaims the famous “fate” theme of the entire work.  The second movement opens with a lovely oboe solo, which is then transformed into a folk song that the strings carry and develop.  The third movement races through the sections of the orchestra—exciting solos for piccolo, bassoon, and clarinet—as the string players pluck their fiddles.  Then comes the final movement, for which the composer reserved the percussion (even though there has been plenty of boom already).  Amazingly, Kalia conducted without a score (it’s at least 150 pages long) and certainly shed a number of pounds in his effort to keep the various musical constituencies together and consonant, which is how the work ends, gloriously.  

This concert most promisingly opened the new and 90^th season of music in our city.