By Lawrence Toppman
Every arts event ought to be a voyage of discovery, and the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) concert Saturday at Knight Theater fit the description.
The musicians discovered Louise Farrenc, my favorite underrated French composer, and performed – as they often do in unfamiliar pieces – with extra zest. Concertgoers familiar with Felix Mendelssohn’s oft-played Violin Concerto in E minor discovered that he also wrote a double concerto for violin and piano, though with nowhere near the melodic brilliance.
Newcomers to classical music discovered that Robert Schumann’s symphonies can, when properly done, yield a lot of joy. And latecomers discovered it’s possible to miss the most interesting part of a concert because they couldn’t figure out how to show up on time.
From a chronological standpoint, the concert was homogeneous: All three composers were born within six years of each other, 1804 to 1810, at the dawn of the Romantic Era. Farrenc wrote in relative obscurity in Paris, but Mendelssohn and Schumann became friends in Germany. (Mendelssohn conducted the 1841 premiere of Schumann’s Spring Symphony, which was on the bill this weekend.)
Yet the three works made strikingly different impressions in the hands of guest conductor Akiko Fujimoto and the violin-piano combo of Calin Ovidiu Lupanu and Phillip Bush.
The opener, Farrenc’s Overture No. 2, ran the gamut from Berlioz-style dramatic weight to Weber-like lightness and flowing melody in just seven minutes. Some of her fans swear by her piano pieces (she was a fine pianist and pedagogue), but I most admire her three symphonies and larger chamber works. I doubt the CSO will program one of her symphonies in the next two decades, so you’ll have to stream music to get to know her better.
Felix Mendelssohn wrote his first masterwork, his fizzing Octet for Strings, in 1825. But his 37-minute double concerto dates from two years earlier, when he was still Prolix Mendelssohn: a 14-year-old who tried to show us everything he’d learned in composition class and had no idea how to edit himself.
Lupanu, the CSO’s concertmaster, provided a lyrical violin. Bush, who grew up in Charlotte (his dad taught French at UNCC), sparkled at the keyboard. Fujimoto led the orchestra through its faux-Beethoven dramatic moments at the right speed. Yet sitting through this repetitive barrage of notes was like eating cotton candy for half an hour without getting a sugar rush.
Fujimoto and the CSO provided plenty of buzz in Schumann’s Symphony No. 1. Melody rushed at us in the opening movement like a river of melted glacier water, swift and bracing. The second movement, which Fujimoto had earlier described as a paean to wife Clara Schumann, stressed ardor rather than tenderness and rolled without pause into the exuberant scherzo. The finale strode forward triumphantly but had playful moments, like a stallion kicking up its heels.
Schumann finished this piece five months after marrying Clara Wieck, and it brims over with joy. After our frigid January, it embodied the sentiment in the Adolf Böttger poem “Frühlingsgedicht (“Spring Poem”), which supposedly inspired Schumann: “O, turn, O turn and change your course/In the valley, Spring blooms forth!” A cheering thought for a rough winter, if true.
Pictured: Akiko Fujimoto by Mike Grittani.