The Sedona Symphony opened its 19th season at the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Oct. 15, under the baton of newly-appointed artistic director Janna Hymes, with a guest appearance by pianist Sean Chen.
“What a great way to start your job when you feel so accepted,” Hymes said to more than 300 Sedona music lovers. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kindness.”
The concert program, originally slated to feature the overture from Gioacchino Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri” and Felix Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony, was revised due to an ongoing Arizona-wide shortage of string players. Instead, the afternoon opened with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, followed by Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds in D Minor.
It was apparent from the first chord of the Bach that Hymes and the Symphony are well on their way to remedying the orchestra’s single significant weak point from last season, the imprecise entry of the strings at the beginning of a new passage. On this occasion, their entry was exactly in time, with a lovely honeyed tone. Hymes kept the music moving fast enough to convey a sense of elegance without excessive grandeur.
The second movement of the Bach concerto is often an opportunity for conductors and performers to improvise. While many contemporary musicians fetishize, or pretend to fetishize, literal performance of the great classical masterworks, attitudes in the Baroque period were considerably different. For the entirety of the second movement, Bach wrote exactly two chords. Performers were and are at liberty to play them as written, substitute additional material or improvise. In this instance, Hymes elected to incorporate a selection from Bach’s Sonata No. 6 for Violin and Harpsichord that fit neatly into the space and gave concertmaster Karin Hallberg and harpsichordist Rita Borden a chance to duet.
After the strings had their showcase moment in the Bach, it was the winds’ turn in the Dvorak, a piece that Hymes recalled performing frequently as an undergraduate student with ad-hoc ensembles of her friends in order to practice her conducting. The serenade’s initial movement was filled with an air of bold drama typical of the optimism and jingoism of prewar works for military band, which also lent it the feel of a stroll through Brighton. The second movement, built on folk themes, was soaring and playful with beautifully integrated musical ideas. A slower and more subdued andante was succeeded by a cheerfully inquisitive final movement with sporadic reflections of Beethoven, hints of a return of the military band and a final brisk explosion of sound to finish. The Symphony’s regular bassoonist Cassandra Bendickson took up the contrabassoon for the Dvorak, while Northern Arizona University student Spencer Lewis performed on the standard instrument.
Intermission was followed by the only remnant of the original program, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, with Chen in the solo role. Although the concerto is known as one of Mozart’s less exuberant works, Chen assured the audience that “you will leave this concert feeling happy, not angsty.” Again, Hymes kept the strings together nicely and Chen demonstrated a superb Mozart technique, light, articulate and clear — sufficiently so to shift the piano’s role in the work away from complementary and toward contrasting. The famous foreboding in the style of “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflote” was almost, in the first movement, restricted to the orchestra, with the piano saying something very different. Oddly enough, considering this interpretation, when Chen supplied his own cadenza for the movement, it picked up the darker attitude of the orchestra.
The piano led off the second movement in a more approachable fashion with the orchestra in pursuit, placidity giving way to uncertainty before circling back to the casual enjoyment with which it began. In the third movement, it was the piano’s turn to be moody, and the orchestra’s job to relieve its depression with bursts of enthusiasm. The final cadenza was almost overwhelming in its lushness and the Symphony finished in a rush of triumph, with perhaps just a little relief.
Saturday’s performance ranked as a strong demonstration of how to redeem a piece that, frankly, is one of Mozart’s more sterile keyboard works. The challenge it posed was not made any easier for Hymes and Chen by the size of the SPAC stage, which required the piano to be placed so that Hymes was half-hidden behind the open lid. Rather than take a third curtain call, Chen obliged with an encore, a splash of Sergei Rachmaninoff in honor of the composer’s 150th birthday this year.
So far Hymes has demonstrated an adroit handling of the orchestra and a dedication to precision that does her and her players alike credit, producing further improvement over last season’s Beethoven Seven. The strings are still experiencing moments of uncertainty and hesitation in slower passages that require greater finesse or are more thematically involved. However, Hymes has resisted the tendency that Richard Wagner deplored in so many conductors, who seek to cover shortcomings among the players by speeding up the pace. Her tempi were brisk but never rushed. These improvements can also be seen as essential preparation for the Symphony’s upcoming presentation of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in April, which relies on careful treatment of the strings for maximum effect.
