By Lawrence Toppman
I am sitting here dreaming about a Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) concert in which the first half consists entirely of music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. (Not both halves, of course. My fantasies aren’t that unrealistic.)
It might start with his 12-minute orchestral Ballade in A Minor, played with exuberant lyricism Saturday at Knight Theater by the CSO under guest conductor Anthony Parnther. It might feature soloist Amaryn Olmeda in his violin concerto, to be played with the soulfulness she showed Saturday in the Largo from Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3.
And the second half … well, I’d be perfectly satisfied with a Shostakovich symphony, if it got as dramatic a rendering as his Ninth Symphony did at Knight Theater. Parnther called the dour Russian one of his favorite composers and led an all-the-crayons-in-the-box performance that proved his affection.
You’ll notice, if you saw either concert this weekend, that I haven’t talked about Mendelssohn’s overfamiliar Violin Concerto in E, which Olmeda played as her main piece. What is there to say? Itzhak Perlman found something profound in it when he played the CSO’s gala concert 10 years ago, but only a virtuoso of his age and stature can dig that deeply into such a chestnut.
Olmeda isn’t there yet. She played with an attractive tone and sunny tenderness, which is part but not all of the concerto’s DNA. She seldom varied the mood, except for adding a little brio to the finale, and she didn’t get under the skin of the emotional second movement. To truly appreciate what she might do, you had to hear her Bach encore.
The evening paid tribute to composers who didn’t reach their biblical threescore and ten and were all helped to their graves by overwork and/or stress. Coleridge-Taylor, son of mixed-race parents in London, died of pneumonia at 37. A series of strokes carried Mendelssohn off at 38. Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill health through the last third of his life, including three heart attacks and falls that broke both legs, and died at 68, still resisting doctors’ advice to give up cigarettes and vodka.
But all were relatively young and vigorous when they wrote these pieces, Coleridge-Taylor in his early 20s and Mendelssohn and Shostakovich in their 30s. They pulse with energy: benignly in Mendelssohn’s case, soaringly in Coleridge-Taylor’s and frighteningly in Shostakovich’s.
Fans of Sibelius’ tone poems “En Saga” or “Night Ride and Sunrise” might find parallel feelings in the Ballade, though Coleridge-Taylor got there first. The piece belongs firmly to its late Romantic era and can stand comparison with work by any of Coleridge-Taylor’s British contemporaries.
Shostakovich’s Ninth, written after the Allies’ victory in World War II, was originally meant as a grandiose tribute to Russian leader Josef Stalin. But Shostakovich already knew what most of the outside world did not: Stalin was en route to become one of the three worst mass murderers of the 20th century. (Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler were the others.)
So this symphony, inexplicably dismissed by Soviet critics as “lightweight” or “childish,” is a catalogue of uneasy emotions: sardonic nose-thumbing, terror, loneliness, fright, panic, frustrated rage. Where Stalin presumably heard the blaring brass as symbols of his mighty war machine, we can hear the maddening stupidity of automata marching off a cliff.
Parnther slowed down the melancholy sections as far as he dared, highlighting solo instruments – an anxious clarinet, a mournful bassoon – and creating extra dread. Yet he gave the fast sections the frenzied power they needed to give Stalin a final kick in the ego. I have apparently missed Parnther on his previous appearances with the CSO, as most have been outside the Classical Series. I won’t miss him again.