By Robert Croan
Musicfor America is a Florida-based not-for-profit corporation — part of the Musicfor International alliance founded by Italian conductor-composer Lorenzo Turchi-Floris, with the mission of supporting music education in disadvantaged areas worldwide.
The 14-member string orchestra has toured South Florida in the summer months for several years, with players of international origin. This year’s roster includes, in addition to the United States and Italy, artists from Cuba, France, Ukraine, Venezuela and Poland.
The music they play is designed for audiences unused to classical music, with a limited attention span, perhaps. Most items are not longer than 5-6 minutes each, or else trimmed down to that length, and for the most part designed for easy listening. That said, these diverse musicians play their music very well, having performed their particular repertory together repeatedly within a short time span.
This summer’s orchestral program (there’s a separate chamber music program for four soloists) — heard Aug. 18 at Fort Lauderdale’s United Church of Christ — was as international as the personnel, beginning with a movement from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, moving on to works by 19th-century Cuban and Russian composers, some light 20th-century classics and finally, the premiere run of a new piece by Turchi-Floris himself.
That work, which closed the program, was also the most substantial: Resonantia Mediaevalis, four dances in original medieval style, each in a distinctive rhythm that was underlined by a solo guitar — here splendidly realized by Alessio Nebiolo, whose fluid fingerwork was often hidden in the overall textures. Turchi-Floris has the compositional skills to transform traditional forms into something quite his own — as he has done before more adventurously in a 2016 work for piano and orchestra called Aspettando Anninora — check that one out on YouTube.
The present ensemble’s admirable precision and group spirit, along with Turchi-Floris’ consistently adroit baton work, was evident from the start in the cleanly delineated Mozart extract, the flawless music of the opening Allegro making one wish for the three movements meant to follow.
What did follow, however, was an intriguing novelty, a duo-violin work by José White, an under-appreciated 19th-century Afro-Cuban composer who studied and spent most of his creative life (he died in 1918) in France. It’s a sultry habanera, spiced up by traditional Cuban dance rhythms in the middle section. Soloists here were Orlando and Svetlana Forte, the orchestra’s concertmaster and principal second violin, strong-toned players who provided their lines with dexterity, gusto, and most significantly, with propulsive rhythmic drive, echoed in the orchestral playing.
Next was Vasily Kalinnikov’s Serenade for Strings, a bit shortened but warm-voiced and lovingly phrased under Turchi-Floris’ fleet baton. That mild but melodic salon piece served as an introduction to the afternoon’s most exhilarating moment, with the virtuoso fireworks of young French violinist Charlotte Orcel, in Vittorio Monti’s showcase Czardas for violin and string orchestra.
Orcel’s tone was notably rich and resonant in lyrical passages, her fast roulades inevitably accurate, her stage persona magnetic and appealing. She returned later to lesser effect in John Williams’ Schindler’s List theme — but that was more due to the bland arrangement of droopy music that had carried genuine impact in context of the serious, consequential matter portrayed in the now-classic Steven Spielberg film.
Least successful of all was the familiar waltz-finale from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, a dreary arrangement rendered with little semblance of Viennese lilt or spirit.
A puzzling oddity was Ravel’s Bolero, arranged for string orchestra by Orlando Forte. The premise of Bolero is a reiterated rhythm from the percussion (here splendidly re-created on snare drum by Julie Prock), overlaid by melodic variations from ever-changing instruments of the orchestra. Without the coloristic diversity, the work takes on a different character. It almost worked. Nice try. Close, but no cigar.