The Palm Beach Symphony opened a new era for itself Sunday afternoon with an effervescent, powerful concert of 20th-century orchestral works, performed by a newly restaffed ensemble that stands fair to carry out the group’s mission of expanded cultural influence.
The group of musicians that took the stage of the Gubelmann Auditorium at Palm Beach’s Society of the Four Arts is essentially the orchestra for Miami’s Florida Grand Opera, and that they share the same conductor, Ramon Tebar, no doubt contributed to the feeling of high spirits and camaraderie that was evident throughout the concert.
It even expressed itself in stage business at the beginning of the concert’s second half, which opened with the Divertissement of Jacques Ibert, composed in 1929, in a period when French art music was gleefully and impudently casting aside the weighty traditions of the past. This is a wild and wonderfully funny work, full of bright colors, sparkling scoring and musical jokes such as an off-kilter quotation of the Mendelssohn wedding march from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
During that quotation, which comes twice in the second movement of Ibert’s six-movement work, Tebar and some members of the orchestra looked around in mock annoyance at the musicians who’d played it. Toward the end of the fifth movement, a hand appeared from the wings to the left, holding a box of tissues aloft. Tebar walked over, music still chugging away, took some tissues and wiped off the sweat from his face and neck, then returned to the podium. In the final movement, Tebar picked up a policeman’s whistle and joined in with the percussionist doing the same thing.
There was also faked irritation at the work of pianist Tao Lin, who contributed huge tone clusters at the end of the fifth movement, and whom the rest of the orchestra vocally rebuked when he was pointed out for his bow during the applause from the smallish house. It was amusing and charming, though this is the kind of thing that can go very wrong very fast in an orchestral concert.
But here, it worked; this is not a piece that’s trying to be anything but fun and entertaining, and the hijinks onstage went just far enough to add to the general merriment. Best of all, the musicians played this stylistic grab-bag marvelously, with brio and skill. There was expert string ensemble throughout, particularly in the sixth-movement’s race-to-the-finish galop, and terrific brass playing from trumpeter Leslie Scarpino and trombonist Domingo Pagliuca.
It was a good way to open the second half of a concert dedicated to more-or-less neoclassical works from the past century, and which introduced much refreshing repertoire. One of the larger pieces on the program, the Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc, is a masterwork of its type, with Poulenc’s great gift for melody enriching his genre mashup of pop-song and music hall flavors sharing the table with reminiscences of Brahms and other composers.
The very beginning of the Poulenc didn’t quite come together, but the music was soon restored to crispness, with the orchestra demonstrating thorough sectional unity. The tempo Tebar took for the second movement (and indeed the first) was a little too fast to let the tunes speak, though it was great fun to hear the music zip along this way; still, bubbling rather than driving would fit the style better, and this reading missed some of the tenderness and gentler charms of Poulenc’s art.
The slow third movement was better in this regard, with some admirably soft playing by the ensemble and sweet-toned soloing by clarinetist Paul Green, and the finale’s rapid pace again slighted some of the subtler elements of the music, but there was no denying its wit and sparkle.
Green was the soloist in the opening work Sunday afternoon, the Dance Preludes of Witold Lutoslawski. A popular piece with clarinetists in its original version with piano, it’s even better in its orchestral guise, and it was brave of the orchestra to schedule it as its season opener. That said, it’s an example of the Polish composer’s earlier “folkloric” style, not his more challenging later modernism (i.e., the Second Symphony), and fit well with the rest of the program.
Green and the orchestra played these five miniatures well, giving each of them a distinctly memorable mood and shade. Some of Green’s highest notes were on the thin side (always a challenge for the clarinet), but he has a generous, centered sound that communicates effectively over a wide range of styles. He was particularly affecting in the dark fourth movement, playing with delicacy and a gripping sense of quiet mystery.
Another sinfonietta, this one composed by Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla in 1953, also was on the program, following the Ibert in the second half. It is already characteristically Piazzolla, though one of his earlier pieces, and the orchestra clearly relished playing it. The violas gave the first movement all the folk flavor it needed with its tango-bluesy motif sitting over a syncopated rhythm that ticked along like clockwork.
The cellos did the same kind of good scene-setting work in the second movement, with a mournful, yearning idea that unified the somber proceedings. The finale had a very nice feeling of lift and snap, which made it sound more natural; it was a crisp and muscular performance that never lost the feeling of the dance.
The concert closed with the most well-known of the five pieces, the Classical Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev (No. 1 in D, Op. 25). Tebar’s tempo in the first movement struck me as somewhat too slow (though well within the tradition of tempi for this piece), and the opening bars messy, perhaps because the players expected to go slightly faster. The tempo gave the music a poky feel that was more earnest than humorous, though the musicians played it expertly; the violins gave the falling-octave secondary theme a splendidly coarse folk feel that evoked Haydn in one of his rustic moods.
For the second movement, the violins showed how sweetly they could play the lovely main theme, and the restrained way the woodwinds brought their colors to bear made the music glow. The third-movement Gavotte was given a perfunctory reading, missing its point entirely: the exaggerated courtly dance feel, the running-gag effect of the surprise cadences. A little emphasis here and there would have easily brought that out, but Tebar didn’t seem interested in doing so.
He was more at home in the lickety-split finale, in which the orchestra went off to the races in pulse-quickening fashion and ended the program in joyous affirmation. This was a concert in which conductor and orchestra were having a fabulous time, and they communicated that emphatically.
This is a crucial year for the Palm Beach Symphony, in which it is aiming for bigger things with a young, gifted conductor at the helm and a who’s-who roster of South Florida musicians in the seats. It should be able to make a bigger mark musically than it has in the past, chiefly because of its programming choices.
Sunday’s menu was no doubt revelatory to many in the audience, and there are several canny repertoire selections in the concerts ahead, all of them unified by an interesting theme (New World Symphony annotator Aaron Grad is now doing the notes for the Palm Beach Symphony, and they are excellent). If the orchestra keeps to that formula, it could achieve everything it wants to do and leave a better symphonic landscape behind. Audiences, which are seeing more varied programs from the neighboring Boca Symphonia as well, will be the biggest winners of all.
The Palm Beach Symphony’s next concert is set for 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 6, at the Flagler Museum, Palm Beach. Guitarist Sebastian Acosta-Fox is the guest soloist on a program devoted to the number 39, in honor of the orchestra’s 39th anniversary. Acosta-Fox will play the Concierto de Aranjuez of Joaquin Rodrigo, written in 1939, on a program with the No. 39 symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and the Czech Suite of Antonin Dvorak, which is his Op. 39. Call 655-2657 or visit www.palmbeachsymphony.org.