For its gala fundraiser Thursday night at the Mar-a-Lago Club, the Palm Beach Symphony brought back two of its guest stars from last year, the Russian-American pianist Lola Astanova and conductor Jajha Ling of the San Diego Symphony.
The orchestra also introduced to area audiences a fresh talent, Brazilian tenor Thiago Arancam, who sang a selection of arias and songs from the Three Tenors set list. Because it was a gala performance and the mood was bibulous, light and festive, some of the music-making was a touch on the extravagant side, but in general there was a serious concert to be heard amid all that joviality.
Astanova, who has specialized in late Romantic repertoire, was the soloist in the Rhapsody in Blue of George Gershwin, who was himself of Russian descent. Almost 90 years after its composition, the Rhapsody is starting to show its age, and while its tunes are still memorable and attractive, it doesn’t have a lot of deep structural or pianistic interest (the Concerto in F of only a year later is much better in this regard).
What it does have is a sense of manic high spirits, bookending a warmly sentimental, lovely middle section, and it works best if it’s like an Oreo: crisp and light on the outside, rich and sweet in the center. But Ling led a rather mannered performance in which the little six-note chromatic linking phrase was stretched out like Wagner, and the big slow theme was glacial; the effect was to make the patchwork assembly of this piece more obvious and strip of its forward motion.
Astanova played it well, with gusto in the speedier moments, but also joined in the general time-stretching, giving this cheeky piece an overlay of Romantic languor it can’t sustain. She was more enjoyable in the two solo works that followed: Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu (Op. 66) and the Waldesrauschen (Forest Murmurs, S. 145, No. 1) of Liszt.
In both pieces, she demonstrated a very appealing lightness, with the rolling arpeggios of the Chopin and the rustling wind of the Liszt both sounding gossamer rather than labored. The mid-section of the Chopin was beautifully played, with a lovely, intimate singing tone, and Liszt’s ferocious difficulties were clearly in her command, with the many octaves of its final pages spelling out the theme rather than hammering it.
Astanova has made a number of special appearances hereabouts, usually in elegant finery that flatters her considerable attractiveness, but it would be good to hear her more often, and in more relaxed settings ― recitals in small halls, chamber music ― so we could get a better idea of the range of her talent in a live environment (as opposed to YouTube). The pianist who could write a little virtuoso piano barnburner off a Rihanna tune is a more interesting musician than she’s been able to show in these sorts of concerts, and here’s hoping we all get to hear some of that side of her.
After the break, tenor Arancam took the stage for four songs and two encores, all of them familiar from the 1990 Three Tenors concert in Rome that resulted in the best-selling classical disc in history. Not that these pieces weren’t familiar to begin with, and Arancam gave them everything he had. Like Astanova, he is blessed with physical beauty, and his youth and handsomeness apparently had a strong matinee-idol effect on many of the young women in the audience, who jumped to their feet after each of his songs and cheered.
A native of Sao Paulo, Arancam has sung with the opera companies of Washington, Philadelphia and San Francisco, as well as houses in Europe and Asia. He is a lyric spinto with roles such as Don Jose, Cavaradossi and Pinkerton to his credit, and at its best his is a pretty and exciting voice, with a warm, creamy top and a darker lower register that added some notable edge to his singing.
But it is not a voice with a great deal of stamina, at least not Thursday night. He opened with Puccini’s E lucevan le stelle, from Act III of Tosca, followed by Vesti la giubba, from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. He indulged in all the facial and physical histrionics he could (helped by an open-mouthed Ling at critical points, which caused the audience to laugh), which was somewhat over the top, but effective salesmanship.
No puede ser, from Pablo Sorozobal’s zarzuela La tabernera del Puerto, was in some ways Arancam’s finest performance, his voice well suited for the lightness of this material. His voice lost considerable strength in the final program selection, Agustin Lara’s Granada, and it stayed that way through his first encore, Ernesto di Capua’s Neopolitan standard O sole mio, in which he borrowed the help-I’m-stuck ornamentation before the chorus that Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras made such an indelible, shticky feature of this modest song, which doesn’t need that kind of treatment or benefit by it.
For his second encore, he tackled Nessun dorma, Calaf’s great Act III aria from Puccini’s Turandot, and sang it well, with good phrasing and a secure sense of pitch that never left him. But he was low on power, and his final high A was quite short, so much so that he added a quiet “Vincero” for the last three chords of the postlude.
Arancam has a lot of things going for him: Good looks, a good ear, and a very pleasant, flexible instrument that is admirably outfitted for Romantic opera and song. But his upper register sounds tight and in need of relaxation so that the voice can bloom, and he may have lost volume and presence after only three songs not because of an inherent difficulty but simply because he was trying to keep his throat in shape for the high B at the end of the Puccini. Either way, he might need some new guidance so that he can turn a voice with a lot of potential into a strong, reliable and durable instrument that can give him a long and successful career.
The orchestra itself sounded quite good in the Mar-a-Lago room, even with its boxiness and its wealth of travertine. Massed strings and low brasses benefited particularly, with the lower registers sounding huge throughout the concert. The evening opened with Remembering Gatsby, John Harbison’s overture to his opera The Great Gatsby. The faux-20s foxtrot section, evocative and nicely played, came off best.
The closing piece was Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and this had the overall best playing of the evening. The orchestra had a chance to dig into an American classic, and did so with panache and high style. The solo tuba playing of Jay Bertolet at the ending was particularly good, and the room at Mar-a-Lago gave it a resonance that it would rarely have had in a concert hall. Ling led the players with enthusiasm and a good sense of pacing, and it ended the night in a very satisfying fashion.
The Palm Beach Symphony closes its current season Tuesday, April 9, when soprano Maria Alejandres joins Ramon Tebar and company for an all-Spanish-themed concert featuring Manuel de Falla’s El Sombrero de Tres Picos and the Ritual Fire Dance, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnole, Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso and Rapsodie Espagnole, and Emmanuel Chabrier’s España. 7:30 pm, Kravis Center. Tickets: $50. Call 655-2657 or visit www.palmbeachsymphony.org, or call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.