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SYMPHONY REVIEW
January 29, 2005
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By Anatole Leikin
The Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, the main concert venue for the Santa Cruz County Symphony, is not the most appropriate stage for such events. In fact, there is no stage at all. The orchestra is simply put on the main floor and surrounded by rows of chairs. I had a choice seat in the fifth row, slightly to the left of center, but all I could see was the top of the pianist's head. There is, of course, an excellent recital hall on the UCSC campus, but it holds only 400 people. There is also an ambitious plan to build a large concert hall on the campus, but this project is still at the fund-raising stage. So, for now, the Civic Auditorium is the best Santa Cruz has to offer in this regard.
I stopped grumbling about the visual deprivation a few minutes into Jon Nakamatsu's performance, however. He played Mozart's Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467 — the first collaboration of the Gold Medalist of the 1997 Van Cliburn Piano Competition with the Santa Cruz Symphony — and it was a truly superb performance. Rarely one hears this concerto in such crystalline, stylish delivery, exquisite tone shadings, and refined articulation unmarred by gratuitous pedal smudges. Moreover, Nakamatsu presented a deeply individual interpretation, with some unexpected and delightfully wistful retards and masterful textural voicing.
The perennially popular "Elvira Madigan" slow movement was taken at a faster pace than is commonly done, and it was refreshing. At this tempo, Nakamatsu created a movement that, while still unabashedly dreamy, carried a strong dramatic undercurrent. The finale in Nakamatsu's hands was a winning combination of elegance, drive, and outstanding sound control. Since Mozart wrote this concerto for his own use, he did not write the cadenzas for the first and third movements. Nakamatsu chose cadenzas by Ferruccio Busoni; and, although these are somewhat on the wild side, they nonetheless fit the adventurous spirit of the Concerto. Nakamatsu dug into them with fervor and brilliance. The near-capacity crowd applauded two charming solo encores out of the pianist: Chopin's F-sharp major Nocturne, Op. 15 No. 2, and Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 66.
The orchestra, under the baton of its Music Director John Larry Granger, was a supportive partner of the soloist in the Concerto. The orchestra part of the program consisted of an unremarkable reading of Smetana's symphonic poem The Moldau and an impressive account of the Fourth Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Vaughan Williams is mostly known for his tranquil, pastoral soundscapes. The unyielding serenity of his Fifth Symphony even prompted Aaron Copland to say, "Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes." Listening to the Fourth, however, is like looking at an entirely different beast (for thirty-three minutes). If the Fifth Symphony, composed in the midst of World War II, was a hopeful anticipation of peace, its 1934 predecessor was a premonition of a terrifying war. The composer himself admitted that it "reflects unbeautiful times." The Fourth begins with a tragedy and advances to a calamity. Vaughan Williams recorded the Symphony in 1937, and that performance still shocks us with its unparalleled ferocity. Two major musical sources can be traced in this Symphony. The very opening, according to the composer, deliberately reminisced on the beginning of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, while the rest of the Symphony was modeled after Beethoven's Fifth. The other vital influence was Bach. Not only was Vaughan Williams's writing intensely polyphonic; he also used Bach's musical signature, B-A-C-H (in German musical letters, B flat-A-C-B), and its flattened-out version (B flat-A-C flat-B flat) throughout the Symphony. For some reason, Vaughan Williams denied using the B-A-C-H theme, but its presence in the Symphony is not only unmistakable, it is blatantly audible. The dense contrapuntal textures, with their angular intertwining lines and frenzied writing present quite a challenge for an orchestra, and the Santa Cruz Symphony dealt admirably with all the intricacies in the score. Moreover, as far as I could see from my rather limited point of vision, Granger conducted this complex piece without the score in front of him. All in all, it was a spirited, powerful, and deeply affecting performance.
(Anatole Leikin is Professor of Music at University of California, Santa Cruz. His articles have appeared in various musicological journals and essay collections; he has recorded piano music of Chopin and Scriabin. Professor Leikin also serves as an editor for The Complete Chopin - A New Critical Edition (Peters Edition London).)
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Jon Nakamatsu