Symphony delivers
By Ruth O. Bingham
sweet romance
Special to the Star-Bulletin
Beethoven and Strauss: The Honolulu Symphony performs at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, Blaisdell Concert Hall. Tickets $15-$47.50, at 538-8863.
MUSIC'S Romanticism movement Romanze (the genre), and romance (the feeling) were highlighted yesterday in Honolulu Symphony's continuing Beethoven Festival. These terms, so familiar, so common, nearly defy definition: It is easier to skirt their edges and describe by example.
Music Director Samuel Wong skirted those edges very neatly, programming works from either end of Romanticism, works that somehow clarified what happened in between.
Beethoven's second Romanze for violin and orchestra, Opus 50, and Symphony No.3, the Eroica or "Heroic," walked the line between Classicism and Romanticism, while Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, composed almost half a century after Romanticism ended, reflected back on it.
The Romanze, a slow, lyrical work, featured concertmaster Ignace Jang as soloist. Jang's full, singing tone paid homage to the genre's Classical roots in song, but his and conductor Wong's interpretation emphasized its burgeoning romance.
Jang's performance sweet, tender, with gentle artistry, displayed the command concertgoers have come to expect from him. Wong's rather broad tempo, while dampening some of the work's fire, allowed Jang freedom for expressive, romantic nuance.
WONG'S tempo for Metamorphosen, Strauss's "Requiem" as he called it, was equally broad, but perfectly so. The piece cannot be rushed. It is a difficult piece to contour well, and seems to become more so over the years: dark, somber works rarely fare well in our "don't worry be happy" era, and it can be tempting to rush through. Written at the end of World War II in reaction to war's senseless destruction of culture, Metamorphosen conveys despair and profound grief.
Thankfully, Wong closed the concert with Beethoven's Eroica: One needs a heroic symphony to recover from the Strauss. The Eroica, one of the greatest symphonies ever composed, offers its listeners a vast world of sound and feeling, a world in which every note, every phrase, every nuance is important.
The conductor's monumental job is to make coherent sense of that world, balancing the crucial against the merely important. No reading can "have it all"; making everything important results in chaos.
Although Wong's interpretation lacked focus at first, it began slowly to cohere, yielding ever more moments of clarity and insight: The orchestra's stern correction of an "early" entrance (composed so) in the first movement; The spooky opening to the funeral march, replete with the famous "Fate" rhythm opening the (then future) fifth symphony; the weaving of wind solos into the Scherzo's sunny exuberance; etc.
Especially skillful was Wong's pacing of the wide emotional range in the Finale, which he built to a rousing close.
Ruth O. Bingham has a Ph.D. in musicology from
Cornell University, is a free-lance writer and teaches part-time
at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
