SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler, Conus, and Prokofiev: Gerard Schwarz, conductor, Maria Larionoff, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 6.6.2009 (BJ)


After a protracted process of selection, Maria Larionoff finally succeeded to the Seattle Symphony concertmaster title at the beginning of this season. Over the past months she has emphatically demonstrated her fitness for the post, and on this occasion she had the opportunity to show her paces as soloist in a full-scale romantic concerto.

The Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 1, is the only substantial work by the Russian-born violinist-composer Jules Conus (1869-1942). Laid out in a single movement, it is a blend of forms altogether more subtle and ingenious than one might expect from some analyses. What the composer did was to intersperse his slower material among elements that variously evoke the exposition and development sections of the sonata pattern, together with rudiments of the introductory orchestral ritornello of the classical concerto. Such formal ingenuity aside, this is undeniably a virtuoso vehicle written by a master of the instrument to set it off in the most dazzling light, and that light shone brightly in Ms. Larionoff’s sumptuously toned and brilliantly phrased performance.

Gerard Schwarz led his players with an equally sure hand in support, but it was in the other two works on the program that the orchestra had its own chance to make a major impression, The opening Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony-Schwarz is evidently unconvinced by the various completions essayed by musicologists from Deryck Cooke onward-is intensely emotional and indeed intensely self-regarding music. Yet, narcissistic as it is, it also works notable magic with a linear style of writing that surely foreshadowed new directions the composer’s music might have taken if he had lived. Schwarz shaped it with his usual sensitivity to Mahlerian expressive ambivalence, and John Cerminaro’s horn section achieved some especially eloquent moments.

If Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, with the rapt intimacy and romantic passion of its depiction of young love, did not exist, few of his admirers would have felt the need to invent it. For all his Protean powers of transformation, intimacy and passion are not qualities that we usually associate with the composer. And yet, along with the wit and flash and pageantry appropriate to other aspects of the action, they are the qualities that have made his ballet one of the most widely enjoyed and celebrated treatments of a story that has not lacked for musical interpretation. The seven movements selected for this program were played with just the right combination of incisive articulation and swagger, providing a rather odd combination of repertoire with a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion.

Bernard Jacobson


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