MOSCOW CHAMBER ORCHESTRA LEAVES AUDIENCE ECSTATIC
By Laura Stewart
Daytona Beach News-Journal, FL
Feb 26 2007
DAYTONA BEACH — Constantine Orbellian and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra
did many things at Sunday’s Central Florida Cultural Endeavors concert,
but by their third encore one stood out: They made virtuosity fun.
When Orbellian led Alexander Mayorov, the Russian ensemble’s
concertmaster, in a spectacular riff on "Yankee Doodle Dandy," he
rewarded the audience that had jumped to its feet in appreciation
several times already. During the News-Journal Center performance,
as the 17 string players from Moscow moved nimbly from one work
to another, it was easy to understand the audience’s enthusiasm;
conveying its causes is trickier.
>>From beginning to end, the concert performance was absolutely
masterful, and unusually invigorating. It wasn’t just the musicians —
especially Mayorov and the three cellists, led by principal Alexander
Zagorinsky. Neither was it simply Orbellian’s way of communicating
with the musicians, who responded to his every eloquent gesture,
nor was it the subtle pulse established in a program that alternated
between relatively gentle and absolutely, rivetingly dramatic.
It was all of those, along with a surprising dash of humor and the
artists’ sheer, entertaining enjoyment of their music. The program
opened with Edvard Grieg’s elegiac neo-classical "From Holberg’s Time,
Suite for String Orchestra, Op. 40," then moved into the impassioned
"Three Armenian Dances," written before the 1915 genocide by Komitas,
to preserve Armenia’s folk music. The mood shifted back to classical
after the gleaming grand piano arrived onstage, and Alexander Kobrin
matched his brilliant style to the polished perfection of the Moscow
musicians in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E flat.
Stately, always elegantly cogent, even majestic at times, the Mozart
Concerto outdid all of the performances dedicated to the composer last
year, the 250th anniversary of his birth. Yet, when Vladislav Lavrik
and his trumpet joined Kobrin and the orchestra after intermission,
the Mozart seemed languid. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1933 Concerto No. 1
in C minor for Piano, and Trumpet, Op. 35 was the evening’s highlight,
a dazzling display of everything from sonic abstraction to sudden,
vivid nods to pop culture, from cerebral phrases to jazzy, witty
musical references.
Almost incomprehensibly complex and demanding, the concerto brought
the orchestra to new heights but put the spotlight directly on Kobrin,
Lavrik and their witty, wonderful dialogue. The final notes had barely
faded before the audience seemed to rise as one, cheering.
It would seem that the Moscow musicians couldn’t top the Shostakovich;
they didn’t even try. They merely shifted gears again and gave an
atmospheric, memorable performance of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto
Grosso in D minor for Two Violins, Cello and Orchestra. As rich as the
rest of the stellar performance, the Vivaldi rounded out Orbellian’s
fine balance of loud and soft, vivid and reflective that balanced
the program.
Until he introduced his "first encore," the sweet Russian lament that
led to the next encore, a sizzling tarantella that swaggered. Any one
of the evening’s works would have been enough; the encores were icing
on a luscious layer cake. But then Orbellian, in a last, virtuosic
burst that underlined the fun, played up his own expressive style in
the hot, happy, utterly exquisite "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and brought
the house down.