As he strolled in from offstage, he looked for all the world like a kid on Christmas morning, dressed in gear that might have been raided from three or four different gifts, gazing around with wide-eyed wonder at the festive magic before him.
But he was Amadeus Leopold, the young violinist born 26 years ago in Seoul as Han-bin Yoo, a greatly gifted prodigy and Itzhak Perlman protégé who graduated from the Juilliard School in 2009. Formerly known professionally as Hahn-Bin before choosing his Teutonic monicker-hommage to Mozart père et fils, the violinist is pursuing a career that marries stagecraft to his musicianship.
Saturday night, at the first orchestral concert of this year’s Festival of the Arts Boca, Leopold was the guest soloist in the Violin Concerto (in D, Op. 35) of Tchaikovsky, which he performed with the Boca Raton Symphonia on a concert of music devoted to the Russian composer. The purple-Mohawked Leopold played it while wearing a campy regalia consisting of a Julie Newmar-style cat’s-eye mask, a T-shirt with the Rolling Stones lips-and-tongue logo repeated ad infinitum, blue pajama-like bottoms decorated with concentric circles, black semi-platform shoes and a black opera cloak with devil-red interior.
The cloak was doffed after the first movement, as was the mask, and Leopold moved around on stage, making use of a Prince-style regal chair downstage right, and two three-stair platforms, one at downstage left, and one center stage behind conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos. His instrument was amplified, as were the sections of the orchestra.
Leopold’s theatrics were mildly diverting, from the little sword thrust movement he did with his bow before holding it aloft (winning applause each time), to eyewear changes (mask to glasses to shades), to his sitting in the Prince chair and playing with his legs crossed. The whole presentation seemed somewhat low-rent to me, frankly, though that could be because of the stage materials he had at hand. But I think it’s that there’s a slicker version of his show in the moves he presented Saturday night, and it probably involves projected images of some sort.
In any case, the most important issue here was Leopold’s playing, and he is an excellent violinist. His technique was large and well-drilled, with nary a missed note in any of the blizzards Tchaikovsky set down, and his intonation – particularly in those stratosphere cadences in the cadenza – was spot-on throughout. For much of the second movement, I looked away from the stage so I could concentrate on the music, and what I heard was playing of classic, old-fashioned elegance. Leopold’s tone was tense and pretty, his phrasing natural and sensitive. His theatrics gave him license to exaggerate almost anything in the music he set his bow to, but he mostly chose not to.
In the finale, he tore through the music with exemplary skill, and the microphone allowed the listener to hear each of the cleanly executed notes in the main theme’s racing figures, the lower ones of which are often inaudible in non-amplified performances. Kitsopoulos and the orchestra deserve the Good Sport Award for accommodating their soloist, which required a good bit of leeway to allow for Leopold to wander through the string section, or in the case of the finale, make it over to the stair assembly behind Kitsopoulos to start the movement proper. In the latter case, that meant a very long pause from the C-sharp that ends the intro to the D where the main theme starts, as Leopold walked from the front to the platform to start playing.
Leopold appears to be, by training and instinct, a serious-minded professional who clearly would not allow himself to play badly on purpose to achieve a dramatic effect, no matter what he was wearing. The trouble here is that the Tchaikovsky concerto is not one that lends itself particularly well to Leopold’s concept Saturday night, with the possible exception of the dizziest parts of the third movement. It would seem to be better-suited for a 19th-century showpiece such as the Sarasate Zigeunerweisen, and indeed Leopold can be seen in any number of Internet videos in just this sort of literature.
The audience at the Mizner Park Amphitheater found him extremely entertaining, and I’m all for freshening up concert presentations to bring more people into the hall, and for letting an artist try what he thinks is the best way to get his particular message across. That the theatrics and the neo-Classicism of Tchaikovsky’s popular concerto didn’t quite mesh is no reflection on Leopold’s considerable ability, and surely for most audience members Saturday night he set himself apart as an artist to watch.
The concert opened with the Coronation March, which Tchaikovsky wrote for Tsar Alexander III’s official installation in 1883. Now excerpted as an entrance march for the current presidents of Russia, it’s a catchy, lively piece, full of brass fanfares and a spirit of celebration. It got a somewhat soggy performance from the expanded Symphonia, with sometimes shaky ensemble for a work that calls for spit-polish precision.
After the concerto, the second half was given over to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony (in E minor, Op. 64), one of the composer’s most popular works. It’s not particularly well-suited for outdoor performance, however; the Fourth would have been a much more effective choice.
The Fifth is largely a gentle work, despite the big brass colorations and triumphant march of the finale, and in the middle of the balletic third movement, the Symphonia was hard-pressed to compete with a motorcycle that roared to life near the amphitheater and then took its loud, sweet time clearing out of Mizner Park and out of earshot.
That said, there were a number of good things about this performance, including fine solo horn playing in the famous second movement, graceful string playing in the third, and a nice buildup of steam by the full orchestra in the final pages of the finale. Overall, tempos were on the sluggish side, particularly in the first movement, which could have started off a little bit swifter so that the shape of the germinal march motif was more apparent.
But the biggest difficulty was that a good deal of the quieter passages got lost in the outdoor venue despite the microphones. This isn’t a work the Symphonia would normally play because it’s written for a big orchestra, not one of chamber size, and it would have been more enjoyable to hear it inside without the distractions to hear what they could make of it.
The Boca Raton Symphonia and Constantine Kitsopoulos return to the festival Thursday night for a performance with organist Cameron Carpenter. The program includes the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue of William Walton, the Toccata Festiva of Samuel Barber, and the Organ Symphony (No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78) of Camille Saint-Saens. Tickets for the 7:30 p.m. concert start at $15. Call 866-571-2787 or visit www.festivaloftheartsboca.org.