Longtime patrons of the Lynn Philharmonia will be aware that the group has enjoyed large audiences for years, even in the days before the Wold Center was built and the student orchestra was somewhat smaller.
But it was good this past weekend to hear that pointed out on stage by Edward Atkatz, a Lynn professor and former principal percussionist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Other music schools have student orchestra concerts like this, he said, but they don’t get this kind of crowd.
And lately, those crowds have been privy to some truly exciting music-making, as conductor Guillermo Figueroa has pursued a policy of adding contemporary music to each program, with excellent results. On Saturday, there were two such works of American music: Christopher Rouse’s percussion fantasia Der Geretette Alberich, and In Memoriam, by the Boca Raton-based former orchestra executive Marshall Turkin.
Turkin, who in his late 80s has returned to the composition career he once pursued fresh out of service in World War II, has heard his wind quintet (Century Souvenirs) played this season by the musicians of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival and another orchestral piece (Five Brief Essays) played in 2011 by The Symphonia Boca Raton, which Turkin founded 10 years ago in the wake of the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic.
Turkin’s In Memoriam was dedicated to the six Lynn students and professors who were killed in 2010 during the Haitian earthquake. Despite its title and intent, the work is not an Adagio for Strings-style threnody. Although it begins somberly, with a dark, slowly rising motif in the violins, it soon becomes much livelier and more forceful, evoking the life energy that the catastrophe would extinguish.
This upward gesture in the first moments runs through the work in different guises, broken into varied rhythms and patterns, and Turkin uses a wide, interesting palette of orchestral color that makes the musical texture glimmer as it builds from the first bars to a huge climax before coming down again. It is like nothing so much as a movement from a David Diamond symphony, with the same kind of melodic material, seriousness of intent, and sonic coloring.
A worthy work, and more substantial than the Five Brief Essays, it received a committed performance from Figueroa and the orchestra. The audience received it respectfully if not passionately, a mark of the music’s relatively sober profile.
Atkatz was the soloist in the Rouse concerto, which is inspired by themes from Wagner’s Ring cycle (and indeed it opens with the final pages of Götterdämmerung). This work from 1997 has turned out to be perhaps Rouse’s most-often performed piece, a fantasia that allows a good percussionist to shine and an audience to get a long look at the panoply of things that percussionists get to strike and scrape in the carrying out of their musical duties.
In remarks before the piece, Atkatz indicated his battery of instruments on the stage, and said the front two rows in the house probably thought things would get pretty loud. They’re right, he said, and handed out bags of orange-foam earplugs to those rows. It was a nice touch, and increased everyone’s anticipation for the Rouse.
In the event, the piece got a fine performance, even with some shaky intonation from the orchestra in the first bars, which again are Wagner’s. Atkatz played all of his various instruments with scrupulousness and gusto, clearly enjoying the middle rock-band section in particular, when he got to sit at his trap set and let things fly.
He also got some good support from the other percussionists in the orchestra, particularly in the final moments, when the marimbist played one of the motifs at the very top of the instrument and the timpanist gave Atkatz a powerful cushion of support. Rouse’s piece is great fun, and the large audience at the Wold Center appeared to really enjoy it.
The second half of the concert was devoted to the Eroica Symphony (No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 55) of Beethoven, which as Figueroa correctly pointed out is one of the most important works in music history, having blazed an entirely new path for composers who came after him. And therefore it was very fitting that it should receive the kind of performance it did: Lively, fresh and muscular.
Figueroa conducted without a score, as he often does, and he chose relatively brisk tempos for the first movement and the funeral march; the famous march wasn’t fast, but it didn’t dawdle. The first movement had in addition to its drive a lean-machine kind of lightness in which textures were clear, dynamics were precise and the mood was buoyant.
The somber but not bleak second movement was less tragic than it was darkly dramatic, and while that somewhat diminished the effect of the music’s shift to C major, it was nonetheless lovely, and it further showcased the first oboist, who was excellent throughout the symphony.
The Scherzo was a little on the slow side, after all that, and the impression I got was that the focus was on making sure it stayed together, which it did. The three horns in the trio section handled things rather well, with the top horn making it to his high B-flat each time without cracking; they did play it rather heavily and a lighter approach would have been welcome.
The finale was quite impressive from the standpoint of ensemble unity; this is a tricky movement to keep together in each variation and I’ve heard any number of performances in which things were closer to chaos. But not here: the students did a most admirable job of bringing off this amazing movement. Only the slow variation in the closing pages disappointed, and that not because of faulty playing but an interpretation that needed to give the music more Romantic color, more drama, more ardor.
But the rest of the moment popped off the stage with fire and strength, and surely some of the young musicians of the Philharmonia can be proud of having learned this canonical masterwork as part of a performance that gave its auditors some insight into why this piece broke so much ground when it was new, more than 200 years ago.