Word: dallapiccola
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cover, so why judge an orchestra by its program? Last Friday, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra gave its second subscription concert of the year to an audience expecting the regal waves of sound and emotion displayed in the orchestra's first performance. Featuring works by 20th-century composer Luigi Dallapiccola, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, the intricate program additionally benefited from the presence of pianist Randall Hodgkinson. Though listeners may have been mystified by the opening pieces, it wasn't long before the nation's oldest continuously performing symphony orchestra revealed the source of its longevity--the quality and enthusiasm of its talented...
Hodgkinson, a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, opened the program with Dallapiccola's Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera, a set of 11 variations upon a twelve-tone theme that the composer created for his daughter and presented to her on her eighth birthday in 1952. In the pre-concert lecture, Harvard professor John Stewart illuminated, a la First Nights, the history of Dallapiccola's career and discussed points of interest like the Simbolo, a four-note theme derived from the letters in "Bach." As concertmistress Stephanie Misono turned the pages of his score, Hodgkinson breezed through the simplistic...
After Hodgkinson's applause-accompanied exit from the stage and the discreet lowering of the lid of his piano, conductor James Yannatos took his place in front and led the orchestra into--surprise--Dallapiccola's Variations for Orchestra, a reiteration of the themes that had just resounded from the piano. If the atonal phrases had been disjointed in the piano score, they were fully severed and disconcertingly tossed together in the full orchestral rendition. Rhythms and chords seem to collide haphazardly; though the multi-instrumental texture of the piece gave greater depth to Dallapiccola's notes than the solo piano...
...defuse any violent reaction to the composer's contemporary style: "The piece is accessible to anyone who will open his or her ears and listen carefully to it, giving it as much attention as a film with a complex plot." This was correct in one respect: listening to Dallapiccola's Variations invoked the sensation of watching last year's Mission: Impossible. No matter how much one tried to pay attention to the plot's convolutions, one was continually plagued by the question, "What is going on?" while the sole consolation was the star quality of the actors. The performing members...
Friday's finale proved no less majestic than the Dvorak of November, even though the orchestra had had less time in which to prepare their repertoire. Even the Dallapiccola pieces were bearable, if only for the novelty of watching Randall Hodgkinson and the talented orchestra attack the variations. Variety is, after all, the spice of life...