Opening A New Season, The Key West Symphony Triumphs
By Harry Schroeder
Saturday – October 10th, 2010
Chee-Yun: ‘Absolutely wonderful.’
The Key West Symphony, under the baton of Sebrina Maria Alfonso, opened its season on Wednesday night with a superb concert. The program included Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture,” Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” and, most notably, an absolutely wonderful reading of the Beethoven “Violin Concerto in D” by the South Korean violinist Chee-Yun.
As a way of beginning an orchestral season, it could not have been improved on — it made last season’s difficulties seem as if they had never happened. After this concert, to say that this orchestra is back on track would be a serious understatement.
The Brahms seemed to serve as a warm-up, a way to shake out and loosen the musical muscles at the start of the evening and the season. Most of the musicians were new to the Keys: of the 70 on stage, only 11 were holdovers from last January’s concert. The strings gained in precision as the piece went on. The brass and woodwinds were excellent throughout. Andrew Balio, principal trumpet, ensured that his section did not suffer from the absence of the always outstanding Judith Saxton. The horns, led by Elizabeth Segura, demonstrated a degree of control unusual for those recalcitrant instruments. Three of the regular principals — Kimberley Valerio on flute, Leslie Starr on oboe, and David Drosinos on clarinet — were responsible, along with Adrian Morejon on bassoon and Segura, for a section sound that any
major symphony could be proud of.
This was true throughout the concert, but especially in the Brahms and in the extraordinary voicings at the beginning of the Beethoven, which set the tone for the whole piece.
The Beethoven concerto is one of the most familiar compositions in the entire repertoire. I doubt that many serious concertgoers don’t already have a fairly complete sense of it in their ears’ memory. Chee-Yun not only matched mine, she replaced it with her own. There is no virtue a violinist can have that she did not demonstrate, consistently. She plays always at the level of technical virtuosity that is expected of violinists nowadays, but with an unusual degree of relaxed confidence. Like a great athlete, she makes everything look easy. Her technique was most on show in the cadenzas at the ends of the first and third movements: dazzling speed runs, much double stopping and, at one point, a startlingly rapid run-up to a triumphantly held note at the top of the instrument’s range.
Chee-Yun communicated that sense of security which comes when a musician is perfectly in tune. Her playing was rhythmically accurate and with momentum, which allowed her in many passages to lay back comfortably into the time. In the slower movements she was quietly eloquent: she seemed to play just a little more softly than one would expect but at the
same level of intensity, to achieve a quality of understated ardor. Everything she did was done gracefully and with absolute integrity. And she and Alfonso made a fine pair; both have an acute sense of musical drama, in dynamics, in phrasing, in slight hesitations to delay an expected resolution.
Chee-Yun, with Alfonso’s orchestra behind her and playing up to her, brought off the most valuable of all results musicians can achieve. Their playing matched and thereby expressed the full emotional and spiritual center of the music. And when the music is Beethoven’s …! The audience knew this and felt it. One is not supposed to applaud until the end of a
piece, but her performance was so fine that they gave her, uniquely, a standing ovation after the first movement. It was one of several at this concert, all of them well deserved.
The program closed with a performance of the Elgar Variations, all 14 of them. This was a very smart choice. Elgar was a bit behind his time as a composer and his music, while richly orchestrated, is often a little obvious — there are few surprises in it. After Chee-Yun, this might have been an anticlimax. Instead, it was the perfect sequel. The orchestra sounded like a group of people enjoying and expressing the afterglow of something outstanding, in a performance that, after the focused intensity of the Beethoven, was broad, relaxed and warm. And there were fine moments: a short flute solo, elegant playing from the lead bassoon, a virtually perfect unison from the violins and several instances of
great power from the entire orchestra, driven from below by the tuba and trombones. At one point Katherine Kayaian, one of the orchestra’s holdovers, leading the cello section, had the melody, first by herself and then with her cohorts, and the sound was so rich and full that the entire string section picked up on it and lifted the music to an entirely new level.
This was a concert we will remember for a long time.
