By Lawrence Toppman
It was, as Yogi Berra reportedly said, déjà vu all over again at Knight Theater on Saturday.
Two years ago this month, guest conductor Andrew Grams opened the Charlotte Symphony’s 2022-23 classical season with an exciting short piece by Anna Clyne, a famous concerto marred by a stodgy soloist, and a nuanced interpretation of an orchestral work we don’t often hear.
On Saturday, Grams opened the 2024-25 classical season with an exciting short piece by Clyne, a famous concerto marred by a willful soloist, and a nuanced interpretation of a work I don’t hear often enough.
Grams introduced the concert by describing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 as “the piece you came to hear.” Yet Clyne’s complex “This Midnight Hour” and Bartok’s extraordinarily varied Concerto for Orchestra provided the reasons to attend.
Grams correctly called Clyne’s catchy piece “cinematic” and listed the amazing array of tempos indicated in the score: ferocious, gentle but with strength, feverish, beautiful but eerie and many others, leading up to tender.
Clyne’s music flowed chromatically but quirkily toward a warm-hearted finish, stopping along the way for a blast from Mexican-style trumpets or a waltz made unique by having violas play out of tune. These short pieces have whetted my appetite for a longer work from Clyne, such as her Grammy-nominated double violin concerto.
Chaeyoung Park seemed to approach Tchaikovsky with the young artist’s need to assert herself as an individual. (She’s 25.) That meant playing section after section in a way that would seem new to us, but she did the composer no favors. From the Chopinesque dreaminess of the first-movement cadenza to the frenzied finale, she chose eccentricity for its own sake.
She and Grams (who presumably let her pick the tempos) dragged the opening of the andantino down to half-speed, so notes plopped out one by one with agonizing slowness. When the tempo picked up, she rocketed ahead with flailing fingers. She tore into the final allegro con fuoco with the requisite fire, but with a frantic wildness that yielded neither joy nor grandeur. By contrast, her encore — Earl Wild’s florid arrangement of the George and Ira Gershwin song “Embraceable You” – had an easy, rippling attractiveness.
Left to his own speeds and inclinations, Grams redeemed the evening with an incisive reading of Bartok’s piece, an astonishingly vital work for someone who was already dying of leukemia. (After writing it, he spent the winter of 1944 at the Albemarle Inn in Asheville, where he bounced back briefly from the illness that took his life the following year.)
Bartok’s piece is just what the title suggests: a five-movement work lasting nearly 40 minutes that gives each part of the orchestra a chance to shine. From the ominous opening rumbles in the double-basses to the woozy outbursts of the brass in the raucous fourth movement, the musicians seized these with pleasure.
As Grams did with Richard Strauss’ less-layered “Aus Italien” in 2022, he dug out everything the composer left for him to find. The reading was mysterious, muscular, melancholic and merry in the right places. Like Beethoven at the end of his Symphony No. 2 and Dvorak in the finale of his Symphony No. 8, Bartok wasn’t afraid to make rude, even vulgar noises. Grams and the CSO played those with the same enthusiasm as the witty, lush and sardonically playful moments that had come before.