Eminent guest conductor and violinist Joseph Silverstein showed an experienced hand in both roles. In an accessible, listener-friendly program, he played a popular violin concerto, and conducted an intriguing overture and an expansive symphony.
The familiar melodies from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major" (1775) showed the 19-year-old composer maturing into the full flower of his compositional gifts. Silverstein delighted in playing this chestnut of the violinist's repertoire. He interpreted the Concerto with the restraint and elegance historically appropriate to the Early Classical period.
Masterworks review
What: Honolulu Symphony with Joseph Silverstein
He established great rapport with the musicians, and they clearly loved working with him.
Extraordinary clarity and smoothness characterized Silverstein's technique. There was no fudge factor: The strokes of his bow and flights of his fingers were as precise as they were full of grace.
The overture to Hector Berlioz's opera "Benvenuto Cellini" (1838) opened the program and served as an energetic prelude to the Concerto. Mozart himself would have appreciated the wit and vigor of Berlioz, who was born just a decade after Mozart's premature death.
Made infamous by his own memoirs, Cellini provided a fertile Romantic opera subject: a Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor who also dabbled in music, military affairs and murder. Both Mozart and Berlioz shared Cellini's fiery artistic temperament, and checkered career history. (Doesn't it seem that the most prodigiously talented artists have the hardest time holding a job?)
Both Mozart and Berlioz took the conducting podium to help musicians understand their formidable and forward-thinking compositions. And both wrote masterful operatic overtures. Brilliantly weaving ideas and melodies from the opera about to unfold, the overtures held out breathless promise for what awaited their audiences.
Sunday's performance of the "Cellini" overture artfully conjured images from his adventurous life. Silverstein's sure baton brought out Berlioz's filigreed orchestration. Lush strings and delicate woodwinds contrasted with bold brass and thundering percussion.
Jean Sibelius, quite an orchestrator himself, explored similar contrasts in his "Symphony No. 2" (1902). The landscape of his native Finland was stark and beautiful, the climate alternately stormy and serene, and the people at once politically oppressed and culturally unfettered.
His music reflected these paradoxes. It also drew inspiration from - and further contributed to - the growing Finnish nationalism at the turn of the century. With a precise baton and lovely hula-worthy hands, Silverstein clarified Sibelius' process of forging grand musical statements from disparate thematic elements.
The second movement was particularly striking. Cellos and basses softly plucked muted low notes, in a musical portrait of silence. From this mysterious background, swelling arcs of strings and brass emerged. The mystery continued to lurk behind the tempestuous vigor of the third movement and the triumphal flourishes of the finale.
Nearly ruining the quiet moments of Mozart and Sibelius, however, were scores of coughing audience members trying to expel insidious firecracker residue from beleaguered lungs.
This pulmonarily challenged critic regrettably joined in the communal respiratory distress. She wishes to apologize to fellow attendees, and remind lolo lawmakers that their protection of one explosive "cultural" practice makes other more benign cultural practices, such as concert going and breathing, more difficult to carry out.