OAKLAND SYMPHONY’S TRIBUTE AS VARIED AS ARMENIA
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
San Francisco Chronicle
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M onday, January 25, 2010
A concert program devoted to the music of one national tradition
is likely to follow several easily foreseen tracks. There will be
works that have made it into the mainstream repertoire, there will
be expressions of fervent and often folk-tinged nationalism, and
there will be music that would never have been undertaken if not for
the theme.
Friday’s concert by Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony
hit all those bases without fail.
The title of the program at the Paramount Theatre was "Notes From
Armenia," and except for the opening ringer, Mozart’s "Prague"
Symphony, all of the music drew on Armenian subjects. Aram Khachaturian
– still the most prominent Armenian in the classical canon – was
represented by his Violin Concerto and an encore performance of his
famous "Saber Dance."
The nationalist angle was represented by two excerpts from "Armenia:
Symphonic Panels" by Ghazaros Saryan and a pair of patriotic anthems
by Edgar Hovhannisyan. And for pure special pleading, there was Edvard
Mirzoyan’s Symphony for Timpani and String Orchestra, a prodigiously
dull creation whose presence on the program was otherwise inexplicable.
If the evening overall did not add up to a clear and coherent portrait
of musical Armenia, perhaps that is to be expected in connection
with a culture as diverse and unclassifiable as any. But there were
pleasures to be had along the way.
Khachaturian’s concerto, though scarcely a model of subtlety or
tact, provides a pretty foolproof vehicle for pyrotechnics, and the
young Armenian violinist Mikhail Simonyan took advantage of every
opportunity. He zipped through the first movement at a breathless pace
(sometimes, in fact, racing ahead of the orchestra) and dispatched
all of the ferocious passagework with fearless precision.
There were some mild tuning problems here and in the even faster
finale, but they vanished in the slow movement, where Simonyan
delivered a soulful and sweetly shaped account of the songful main
melody. Morgan conducted with robust clarity, just as he had in
the Mozart.
The Armenian novelties on the second half culminated with the
appearance of the Seemorgh Ensemble, supplemented by singers from other
local choral groups, to raise the rafters with two populist anthems:
"Yerevan Erebooni," a hymn to the Armenian capital, and "Sardarapat,"
about the 1918 battle that prevented Ottoman forces from completely
overrunning the country.
Like most such expressions of national pride, these proved crude
but undeniably stirring – which was far preferable to the crude but
soporific writing in Mirzoyan’s 1962 opus. Stretched out over four
brutally repetitive movements, the piece was a morass of chunky chords
and drab string textures, leavened only by the muscular interjections
of timpanist Tyler Mack and one beautiful and all-too-brief violin
solo by concertmaster Dawn Harms.
As if to draw a cruel contrast, Morgan followed that with "Garni," the
first movement of Saryan’s painterly suite. Its vivid and inventive
writing for strings alone showed what could be done with those
textures, and the finale, "A Sunny Landscape" – a brisk, brightly
scored gallop dominated by a trumpet solo – proved equally engaging.
The smart move, surely, would have been to include that piece in
its entirety.
E-mail Joshua Kosman at [email protected].
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
