Last week, the Boca Raton Symphonia gave a respectable performance at the Festival of the Arts Boca 2012 of the soundtrack for Casablanca as it accompanied a well-attended screening of the movie.
But the Lynn Philharmonia, which appeared Wednesday with the Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, is a much larger orchestra, and has this year performed the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler and the Symphony No. 1 of John Corigliano. Both are serious challenges, and the group’s concert at the festival demonstrated once more that the school’s steady building of the conservatory, and the expansion of this orchestra, is paying off.
Lisitsa, a most familiar face to South Florida audiences who most recently served as pianist on a major recording with violinist Hilary Hahn of the four sonatas of Charles Ives, was in her native element Wednesday night at Mizner Park with the Concerto No. 2 (in C minor, Op. 18) of Sergei Rachmaninov. Easily one of the most popular piano concerti ever written, it’s usually a success from the very first solo piano chord.
The Philharmonia was led by conservatory chief Jon Robertson, whose military-style podium crispness seems to snap his young charges to attention. Lisitsa has an exciting keyboard style, one in which she’s able to summon up considerable volume to go along with her technical showmanship. She and the orchestra took the opening theme of the concerto rather swiftly, and perhaps because it was being played outdoors, soloist and orchestra were not together at first.
But that straightened itself out, and Lisitsa, who didn’t need to do much to sell this piece, did it anyway, playing the second, E-flat major theme with some rubato, almost jazz-like, rather than with the martial precision that the theme often gets. The orchestra sounded full and lush, and except for a woeful, under-pitch horn solo, gave a strong account of the movement.
The remaining two movements were similarly strong, with Lisitsa playing the slow movement’s theme with clear, beautiful tone, and in the third, rattling away at the cadenza-style figurations and the main march theme with aplomb. Violas and English horn sounded very fine in the most famous music in the piece, the second theme of the finale.
All told, an excellent performance of this concerto by soloist and orchestra, and the audience adored it. Lisitsa, looking striking in a red gown, put down her post-performance bouquet and gave the crowd another Romantic chestnut, the Nocturne (in E-flat), Op. 9, No. 2, of Chopin, which she played straightforwardly and with great tenderness.
The concert opened with a world premiere, the Boca Festival Overture of Marshall Turkin, a retired orchestra executive who founded the Boca Symphonia and has returned, at 85, to a compositional career he abandoned in the 1950s. It’s the second premiere this year for Turkin, whose Five Brief Essays debuted in January with the Boca group.
Turkin writes in a style congruent with the American masters of the mid-century, and in this work, a feisty, expertly scored piece with a jaunty main theme and melancholy contrasting motif, he reminded us of that heritage. The Lynn orchestra played it with verve and gusto, and the strings added a nicely evocative feeling of sadness to the second section.
This is an attractive, unproblematic piece similar in optimistic spirit and general harmonic and melodic layout to the work of Paul Creston, a once-familiar composer whose work is sadly neglected today. But Turkin’s overture indicates that the modern-but-populist orientation of that musical era still has much to offer.
The concert closed with a very impressive reading of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, a bold choice for an audience that had already seen the showcase event, Lisitsa and Rachmaninov, in the first half. But their indulgence was rewarded: this was in every way a faithful and exciting performance of this masterwork.
Robertson’s tempos and overall interpretation were quite traditional, and he resisted the temptation that arises during outdoor concerts in relatively noisy settings such as Mizner Park to speed things up and get to the loud bits faster. In other words, this was not a pops concert-like performance, but a serious traversal of a major work.
Ensemble was especially good, perhaps in part because of Robertson’s tight control of events. The violins sighed just like they’re supposed to in the ball music, and the English horn solo in the third movement had the right sense of peacefulness and big spaces. Dynamics were scrupulously observed, and the hugeness of the timpani and drum rumbles made a marvelous effect.
The brass section, traditionally the weakest in the Lynn orchestra, was splendid here, snapping off that great march tune with swing in the trumpets and forceful snarls in the bass. There could have been a stronger sense of abandon and weirdness in the Witches’ Sabbath, but that’s often hard to do, because Berlioz, for all of his imaginative genius, is at heart too wedded to the stiffness of his idols Gluck and Spontini to truly let loose.
The audience gave this performance a hearty ovation, and the Lynn Philharmonia and Robertson deserved it. It has to be counted as another sign of progress for this orchestra, which is bigger and better than it was only a couple seasons ago. If Lynn’s conservatory can maintain this level of cultural quality, and continue to lure first-rate students, our local symphonic scene will only get richer.
The Festival of the Arts Boca continues today with a St. Patrick’s Day Bash, set for 3 p.m. at Mizner Park. Guests include the Seven Nations Celtic band, the Drake Irish Dance company, and fiddlers James Kelly and Donna Long. Call 368-8445 for tickets or visit www.festivaloftheartsboca.org.