Chamber Orchestra Celebrates 50 Years With Modern Flourishes & Classic LvB

Time flies when you’re playing great music. That new kid on the block, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The season concluded with a celebratory concert on Mother’s Day featuring two lively short works from the modern era and two Beethoven classics.

Although Beethoven composed the Triple Concerto Op. 56 and the Fifth Symphony Op. 67 just a few years apart in the dawn of the 19th century, both works have completely different temperatures. The Triple (for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra) is still redolent with the classical heritage of Mozart and Haydn, the Fifth forging new pathways of musical logic and sustained expressive power.

The program had an unusual shape and flow to it in terms of sound and energy. The explosive opening salvo was Brossé’s own composition, The Philadelphia Overture, dating from 2010, bright with chimes and brass. The work shows influences by Elmer Bernstein and John Williams, but the message is entirely Brossé’s own.

Following in contrast, the Triple unfolded with calm deliberation. Orchestrally, this was a performance muted to let the standout trio take center stage. The three soloists—violinist Soovin Kim, cellist Marie Elisabeth Hecker, and appropriately commanding pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn—engaged in a true musical conversation, a tête-à-tête among their instruments which never faltered and showcased impeccable technique and deep understanding of this largely underappreciated work.

This attempt to showcase the trio, however, sometimes led to a quietist effect in the orchestra, where upper tones occasionally seemed to evaporate before they reached the ear. The overall effect, however, was a pleasing one, a long (30-minutes-plus), satisfying reverie between the attention-grabbing overture and the piquant Barber Toccata Festiva to follow. While all three soloists were superb, special note must be made of Hecker’s heavenly tone, especially evident at the beginning of the second movement.

The pitch of the program rose again after intermission as Alan Morrison, one of the great American organists and Haas Charitable Trust Chair in Organ Studies at Curtis Institute, joined the orchestra in Barber’s Toccata. What a strange, engaging work this is, complex in its structure and orchestration, alternating between organ and orchestra, gripping the attention of listeners at various levels of sophistication. This is a relentless, driving short work, with no let-up. Brossé and Morrison were certainly enjoying themselves, the tall organist’s fingers and feet flying over keys and pedals, creating a sensibility both modern and gothic. A little loud for me and perhaps for a Chamber orchestra, but Barber’s vision was well served in a rousing exposition.

For the last celebratory work, Brossé conducted Beethoven’s Fifth in all its familiar but still exultant glory. He took the orchestra lickety-split in a high-velocity whirl through the first movement. It was a little fast, but then, speed adds a kind of celebratory zest to a performance, and so it worked well for this occasion, if not for others.

Most of us never weary of this work, as strong a statement of hope and triumph as ever issued from a creative mind. In Beethoven’s case, that mind had no reason to hope at all, as he sank into the dark night of deafness and despair. His ascension out of that despair in the Fifth Symphony is what makes us keeping come back to it time and again. I suppose that inexhaustibility is what makes a classic, not only in symphonic music, but in other forms, like Jazz. Every time I hear a great performance of “Green Dolphin Street” or “I Remember Clifford,” it’s as though I am hearing it for the first time. O magnum mysterium.

Now five years at the helm of the Orchestra, Brossé truly is a wonderful conductor, and Philadelphia is lucky to have him. He provides a broad overview of a work, brings out compelling solo lines, sometimes in ways that surprise (such as the drawn-out oboe solo in the otherwise breath-taking celerity of the first movement). The orchestra is the right size with the ideal dynamic range for this work, though I admit, on occasion, I do love to hear that famous transition from the third to the fourth movement conducted by a latter-day Stokowski with a double-sized orchestra in the Hollywood Bowl!

Before the concert got underway, the Orchestra’s board members offered some affable congratulatory statements and introduced the group’s three conductors over a half century of music making: the founder, Mark Mostovoy, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, and Dirk Brossé. One of the Orchestra’s original musicians still plays in the first violin section: Igor Szwec. The audience cheered, and seldom have musicians and an ensemble deserved such a round of gratitude and praise. --Linda Holt

What, When, Where

The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, 50th Anniversary Concert, Dirk Brossé, conductor. Soovin Kim, violin; Marie Elisabeth Hecker, cello; Ignat Solzhenitsyn, piano; Alan Morrison, organ. Brossé, The Philadelphia Overture; Beethoven, The Triple Concerto in C Major Op. 56; Barber, Toccata Festiva; Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67. May 10, 2015, Verizon, the Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia. http://www.chamberorchestra.org/ Below: Dirk Brossé conducting the Chamber Orchestra.