The Miami-born composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, first woman to earn a Pulitzer Prize for music and the first woman to earn a composition doctorate at Juilliard, remains busily composing in her 70s.
The part-time Pompano Beach resident’s piano concerto Shadows, which premiered in 2011, had its first Florida performances this past week on the programs of the South Florida Symphony. Pianist Jeffrey Biegel was the soloist in the four-concert series, which on March 30 took place in the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale.
Zwilich switched to a post-Romantic style in the 1980s after years of fashionable atonalism, and that decision, which has become more or less mainstream for others composers in the second decade of the 21st century, helped keep her profile high. South Florida Symphony conductor Sebrina Maria Alfonso has made the programming of Zwilich’s music a relatively regular occurrence; her Septet for string quartet and piano trio was on one of the orchestra’s chamber music programs in January.
The Zwilich of Shadows is recognizably the same composer as the one of the Septet in its unashamed reference to popular music styles, and that no doubt helped sell it to the Broward audience, which received it enthusiastically. Pianist Biegel gave the concerto every attention, engaging with it in a passionate manner that added excitement to the performance.
The idea of the concerto was a reflection on the plural cultural heritage of the United States, and Zwilich said in brief remarks Saturday night that Latin and African-American styles would be part of the mix. The first movement was strongly reminiscent of Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, with the same kind of mysterious impressionist coloring in the orchestra and dramatic statements in the piano. It had a langorous Latinate flavor with some harmonic bite that Biegel played with strength and decisiveness.
While the concerto is virtuosic, especially in the last movement, it’s not flashy; the display is an outgrowth of a positive energy that runs through the whole work. The second movement, which has a walking minor-third back-and-forth pattern meant to evoke traditional New Orleans music, had a feeling of bluesy song and heavy-lidded cool, and featured some terrific principal horn playing, with dramatic outbursts at the top of the instrument’s register.
The third movement evoked George Gershwin’s Concerto in F, with the piano building up to the same jazz-chord two-note swing shout that set Gershwin’s motor in motion, and which served much the same purpose here. Biegel played with great energy and bravura, and the musical language, while reminiscent of Gershwin, had a festive, joyous color that was fun to listen to.
While Shadows was very skillfully written and orchestrated, it also had no real point of arrival in the final movement, though it seemed to need one. The music was always on the verge of going somewhere else and then deciding not to do so after all, and circling back to the two-chord piano statement. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of the style from which it derives; in Gershwin’s case, a sort of jazz Tchaikovsky that necessitates a Big Tune at the end to provide a sense of rhythmic and melodic release.
That’s not really Zwilich’s manner, but the finale needed to reach another plateau, some other way of breaking the tension of its rhythmic drive, in order to be fully satisfying. Still, it’s an attractive work that goes over well, and Biegel, for whom the work was written, and the orchestra played it with obvious enthusiasm.
The rest of the program consisted of two workhorse symphonies, the first being the Haffner Symphony (No. 35 in D, K. 385), of Mozart. The South Florida Symphony enjoys a large string complement, and that gave this reading of the work a sound more congruent with the Mozart recordings of the middle of the past century than the chamber-size performances that are more common today.
The very opening unison D of the Haffner was not together, and neither was the opening of the second movement, and there were a couple other places where Alfonso’s beat must have been unclear, and ensemble suffered as a result. This suggests that this is a part of her technique that she might want to modify in order to get more reliable results.
Tempi were good, and on the brisk side, and Alfonso and the orchestra sounded engaged, insofar as they enjoyed leading and playing this sparkling work. But it was also absent some of the subtleties that make it special: the two-note oboe and bassoon “answer” in the slow movement simply went on by, for example, and there wasn’t a lot of dynamic range in this performance to give the music more breadth. Alfonso also led the minuet directly into the finale, which wasn’t necessary and blunted the effect of the off-to-the-races spirit of the last movement.
The final work on the program, the Schumann Spring Symphony (No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 38), was much more in Alfonso’s wheelhouse, and her reading had plenty of life and power. Indeed, it served as a welcome reminder of what a delightful piece this really is.
The transitions between movements needed to be a little better-judged — maybe just a few more seconds between the second and third movements, plus a cleaner ending to the second; a little more mystery and a bit more time from the transitional passage at the end of the third movement into the fourth —but on the whole, this was a muscular, high-spirited performance. There were some good indications of the quality of players on the stage, such as the beautiful cello section playing in the yearning theme of the second movement, and a lovely flute cadenza in the finale.
Here, too, there could have been some more shade, some more character brought to the themes, such as in the sliding chromaticism of the Scherzo, which begged for some more shape. But in general Alfonso clearly loves this symphony, and the players she’s assembled redeemed this music with an enthusiastic dedication to the spirit of Schumann.