SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

 

Along with his spectacular enhancement of performance standards, Gerard Schwarz’s 26-year tenure as the Seattle Symphony’s music director has been notable for his unwavering championship of contemporary American music. Nothing, then, could have been more appropriate than to mark his farewell season by commissioning new short pieces from eighteen of the composers whose careers he has done so much to foster.

 

The first result of this initiative, supported by philanthropists Agnes Gund and Charles Simonyi, surfaced three days before the “official” opening of the 2010/11 season. Augusta Read Thomas’s Of Paradise and Light, arranged by the composer for string orchestra (without basses) from her 2008 setting of a poem by e.e. cummings, got the project off to a very satisfying start. About seven minutes long, this is music at once approachable in its basically tonal idiom and original in its freshly imagined orchestral textures, each string line independent, yet seemingly propelled and enlivened by its companions.

 

The context was again highly appropriate for the celebration in hand. His dedication to the contemporary notwithstanding, Schwarz has never neglected the core classical repertoire, and he has always been open to exploring fresh formats to attract new concert-goers into the hall. The “Beethoven & Wine Festival,” a pre-season series of three concerts, each played without intermission and preceded by a low-priced wine-tasting, was tried last year with considerable success, and this year’s edition provided an exhilarating run-up to the following weekend’s celebratory gala.

 

The Wednesday audience, encouragingly diverse in age, leapt to its collective feet in vociferous applause for Augustin Hadelich’s performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Born in Italy in 1984 of German parents, Hadelich deserved the cheers. He plays with imagination and taste. His technique is secure, his tone ample and lustrous, especially at the top of the instrument’s range, and he brought infectious rhythmic zest to the finale. Aside from a few curiously prosaic moments just after the first-movement cadenza (a somewhat transmogrified version of the familiar one by Kreisler), this was a reading that combined good classical style with compelling romantic warmth.

 

Schwarz’s contribution was imaginative too–witness in particular a moment in the first movement when the orchestra dashed away with new urgency, as if impatient after being held awhile in check by the solo’s lyrical propensities. Here, as in the Thomas work and the excerpts from The Creatures of Prometheus that opened Beethoven’s share in the proceedings, the orchestra was in fine form, Michael Crusoe’s timpani playing, as crisp and firm as it was discreet, deserving especial praise.

 

Bernard Jacobson

 

This review appeared also, in slightly different form, in the Seattle Times.