Review - Music in Bloom
April 10, 2010 Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra - Saturday, April 10, 2010
Reviewed by Courtenay Caublé
The Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra's final subscription concert last Saturday evening at Ridgefield's Anne Richardson Auditorium was an unqualified winner featuring Sir Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E. minor with Melissa Westgate, the RSO's regular principal cellist, as soloist. The rest of Music Director Gerald Steichen's varied program included Dmitri Shostakovich's Festive Overture, Alexandre Tansman's Sonatine transatlantique, Samuel Barber's First Essay for Orchestra, and Ottorino Respighi's "Fountains of Rome."
Maestro Steichen and the orchestra were consistently in top form from beginning to end, ably supplemented by an impressive group of guest musicians from the Western Connecticut Youth Orchestra - Brianna and Gabrielle Fischler, Jason Fenwick, and Liza Nikitin (violins), Sarah Cuk, Jac Cupkovic, and Glen Ullman (violas), Nicholas Heinzmann and Aaron Kabcenell (cellos), Jonathan Borden (bass), and Robert Karl (bassoon).
Shostakovich's sprightly overture was both a joyous concert opener and a fine showpiece for the orchestra's various sections, with superb brass ensemble playing, sparkling woodwind sound, and rich tone quality from the strings -- especially the cellos.
With syncopated rhythms, saxophone solos, and percussion-permeated echoes of 1920's American dance music, Tansman's impressions of the foxtrot, the spiritual, blues, and the Charleston in his Sonatine transatlantique provided a lively curtain-raiser for the second half of the program by a composer whom Maestro Steichen called "the French Gershwin." And both Samuel Barber's "First Essay for Orchestra," with its multi-faceted development of a basic theme and its glittering orchestration, and Italian composer Ottorino Respighi's equally colorful musical portraits of four of Rome's famous fountains at different times of day provided Saturday evening's appreciative audience with not just beautiful and moving music, but also with further evidence of both Maestro Steichen's sensitive interpretive control and the orchestra's collective musicianship and fine sound.
In spite of the merits of everything else, however, the combination of Elgar's moving Cello Concerto score and cellist Melissa Westgate's solo performance was the evening's high point. Unlike much of Elgar's music, which is most often brightly cheerful or noble in mood, the Cello Concerto is introspective and often richly lyrical -- especially the almost rhapsodic second movement.
I confess to a special love for the full-bodied tone quality and broad potential expressive range of the cello; and Ms. Westgate is an artist under whose fingers and bow those qualities are heard to full advantage. A very fine cellist indeed, equipped with both a sensitive musical sense and an impressive performance technique and control, she managed all of the score's musical filigree with an ease that wove it into a lyrical flow, and in extended song-like passages, as in the wonderful slow movement, she made her instrument sing with a control that defined the lyric line's emotional movement. With the support of Maestro Steichen's fine collaboration and enhanced by the fact that Ms. Westgate's stage appearance was also a visual treat, she definitely merited the standing ovation that her audience gave her.