Zuill Bailey. (Courtesy Colbert Artists Management)
By Robert Croan
A bravura rendition by cellist Zuill Bailey of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor (Op. 33) was the highlight of South Florida Symphony’s season opener at The Parker on Nov. 5.
It was an all-19th-century program, which also featured Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor (Op. 68) — solidly traditional in a season that has to be “safe” in light of government funding cuts, but exhilarating for the virtuosity of this soloist and the overt enthusiasm of conductor Sebrina Maria Alfonso.
The event began with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, music composed for a long-forgotten play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It’s a rousing, dramatic curtain raiser that never fails to please. The players seemed to be still warming up at the start, but by the final coda they provided the precision, strength and echo of victory that reflects Beethoven’s credo of freedom and resistance to despotism in the years of the Napoleonic wars.
Relatively brief at approximately 20 minutes, Saint-Saëns’ concerto’s single movement is jam-packed with tempestuous passion and digital fireworks from the opening whirlwind triplet theme, which Bailey attacked with relish and a sense of fun. The audience was immediately taken in by his enthusiasm, as well as his ability to relax into the more lyrical melody that follows.
The middle portion, a delicate minuet that borders on being a parody of Victorian-era salon music, showed conductor Alfonso’s ability to achieve clean, transparent playing from her orchestra in exposed moments that demand precision and discipline. The final, and most elaborate segment brought back the showmanship from soloist and ensemble alike, as well as more compositional complexity that brings back music from earlier on.
In brief spoken comments, the 53-year-old Bailey described his long-time relationship with this orchestra — this was his 11th appearance — as well as his long association with the conductor, from their student days at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He followed the concerto with the “Meditation” from Jules Massenet’s Thaïs – not the version from the opera with violin solo, but an arrangement for cello, which, though listed in the printed program, served as a well-earned encore.
The Brahms symphony, which took up the concert’s second half, was a respectable, if mostly uneventful rendition of this popular favorite — almost self-effacing after the brilliance of the concerto. While Brahms’s First Symphony is often considered a homage to Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony (in part because of the chorale-like melody that dominates the final movement), Alfonso emphasized the work’s human proportions. She gave rhythmic pulse to the striving chords that set the work in motion, brought out elegantly the solos for violin and horn in the Andante, and trod lightly on the graceful phrases of the Allegretto that substitutes for a scherzo.
This piece is a challenge for any orchestra, as much for its familiarity as its technical challenges, and the present group came through with an imposing finale under Alfonso’s deft baton.