For two seasons, Symphony II has boldly asserted its claim to being the area`s second fully professional large orchestra. With its season finale Sunday evening at Evanston`s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, the ensemble proved, once and for all, the legitimacy of that claim.
On the podium was Larry Rachleff, who had conducted the orchestra`s inaugural concert last year and who has been engaged to direct next season`s finale. Given the close chemistry between him and the players and the quality of the results he has elicited, it`s not too soon to nominate him for music director when the orchestra decides to engage one.
Given the urban violence of recent weeks, Shostakovich`s Symphony No. 11
(”The Year 1905”), which graphically depicts the massacre of unarmed workers at St. Petersburg in 1905, took on a chilling immediacy.
For all the tiresome revolutionary fervor of the fourth-movement finale, the 65-minute symphony contains much music of genuinely tragic eloquence. Rachleff`s grip on the ominous ”Palace Square” opening movement could have been firmer, but he brought deep feeling to the third-movement elegy and drove the fast movements with finely controlled ferocity. The orchestra gave him its corporate best.
Incidentally, this wasn`t the Chicago premiere that Rachleff suggested it was; Leonard Slatkin had conducted the work with the Chicago Symphony nine seasons ago.
The remainder of the program was given over to Rossini`s ”William Tell” overture and Bruch`s Violin Concerto No. 1.
Violinist Elisa Barston, the Evanston-born soloist, now a student at Indiana University, seized the concerto`s darkly lyric passions with fearless technical command and a big, throbbing tone that easily rode the orchestral crests. One could imagine a warmer, more refined account, but none so intense. It will be a pleasure hearing Barston again.
– Ian Hobson`s return to Orchestra Hall Sunday afternoon was a welcome event. The young British-born pianist (now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has been making a name for himself, especially on records, as an eclectic champion of the unusual, with a particular flair for Rachmaninoff. Sunday there were three Rachmaninoff Preludes, brilliantly spun, to prove that the recordings didn`t lie.
There were also three contrasting fantasies, ending with Liszt`s
”Reminiscences de Don Juan.” Schubert`s ”Wanderer” was dispatched in a fluent, tasteful, balanced account that emphasized the work`s structural integrity.
I was less convinced by his Schumann C-Major Fantasy. Again the reading was lucidly organized and intelligently musical; what was missing was a deeply personal engagement with the music`s expressive yearnings.
Hobson was to be congratulated for including a world premiere, Benjamin Lees` ”Mirrors,” dedicated to the pianist. Accessible and elegantly written for the keyboard, the four-section suite disappointed only in its brevity. From the pungent opening trills (which sounded like an homage to Debussy`s
”Feux d`artifice”), to the whirling, toccata-like third piece, to the octave-unison mirrored-melody of the fourth section, Hobson made the best possible case for this music. One hopes the composer will expand it to include more sections.
– Concluding its 20th anniversary season Friday at Mt. Carmel Church, the William Ferris Chorale paid fitting homage to its founder and director with a program of Ferris` choral and instrumental works.
All this music proved well-made and conservative in idiom, packed with celebratory rhetoric, written with obvious dedication for the ensemble that Ferris has made one of the most solidly disciplined of the area`s medium-sized choruses.
Two new works were written for the anniversary, ”Amen/Alleluia” and
”Gloria.” Each was fervently performed, with the resonant church sonics lending pomp and circumstance but also an unwelcome textural thickness.
Two earlier Ferris works, ”Modern Music” (a sumptuous setting of a William Billings text) and Concert Piece for Organ and Strings, expertly played by soloist Thomas Weisflog, closed the program.
