Review: Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra warms the night with well-balanced program
Though the weather outdoors was cold, the Victory Theatre was warmed Saturday night by the music of the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra.
The audience responded enthusiastically to the well-balanced program, a welcome musical refuge from COVID and the cold.
The program began with a charming performance of "Pastorale d’été," an evocation of a summer’s evening in the Alps. In his composition for chamber orchestra, Honegger assigns bird calls to flute and clarinet (both rendered “naturally” and beautifully by Leanne Hampton and Thomas Josenhans) as music wakens to the sound of the horn and then records the companionable warmth of a summer day.
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What followed was sheer musical joy — Mozart’s fifth violin concerto played musically by Timothy Chooi. It comes as no surprise that, at his young age, Chooi has been a laureate in a number of international competitions, so sensitive and intelligent is his playing.
He introduced the audience to his sweet-sounding Stradivarius violin, built in the early 18th century, even predating Mozart’s birth (which makes that special piece of wood more than 300 years old).
Though the concerto begins with a lively orchestral introduction, the soloist must enter with exposed, slow, quiet notes, which Chooi accomplished with aplomb before joining with the orchestra in the remainder of the Allegro.
For a moment the calming warmth of the evening gave way to some brooding clouds — Mozart brings the Turkish Janissaries and their clunky-sounding band into the final movement of the concerto — but then musical calm is restored, and Chooi went on to play a wonderful, fancy-fingered cadenza that he had written himself.
Chooi garnered well-deserved applause after each movement, finally returning to the stage alone to perform an encore, the tuneful slow movement of J.S. Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2. And to think that Bach likely wrote these sonatas as finger exercises!
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Beethoven’s "Seventh Symphony" heated up the entire second half of the program. Conducting without a score, Roger Kalia displayed both his love of the symphony and his careful attention to the symphony’s many musical challenges. And it was worth it.
Cast in the bright key of A major, the symphony begins slowly, with scalar and chromatic figures that wander through various tonalities until the dance figure begins after about 62 measures. The well-known second movement followed, its repetitive march figure varying appropriately in volume and texture until it finally fades away mysteriously in A minor.
As Kalia reminded listeners before he began, there is little melodic material in this symphony; instead, Beethoven brilliantly employs hypnotic rhythms and various instrument textures to provide musical interest.
The third movement, a dizzying Presto, gave oboist Elizabeth Robertson a workout, and she proved herself to be more than a match for Beethoven and his dance.
Then came the fourth movement with its final series of dances, punctuated by a series of sforzandi and whirling to a dramatic conclusion. A thrilling performance of which Kalia and the orchestra should be proud.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Review: Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra warms night with program
