Virtuoso violinist makes a convincing case for Lalo in Pasadena

By Truman C. Wang
Saturday, October 14, 2006

PASADENA SYMPHONY
Jorge Mester, conductor
Ilya Kaler, violin

Lalo?  A strange bedfellow, you might say.  Unlike the prolific Strauss or Shostakovich, the Frenchman was unknown primarily for his five-movement violin concerto Symphonie espagnole, and his opera Le Roi d’Ys.  Fortunately, in violinist Ilya Kaler, Lalo found a most sympathetic proponent.  Playing with great expressiveness and colorful bravura, Kaler clearly reveled in Lalo’s Spanish dance rhythms and made the final Rondo sound truly joyful and festive.  Maestro Mester led his Pasadena players in a gentle yet elegant accompaniment, responding to the soloist’s every turn of phrase with great joie de vivre. 

By comparison, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks sounded ponderous and un-merry.  There was little sense of the music’s impishness and good-natured fun.  The over-careful woodwind articulation and heavy-handed string playing all contributed to this unfunny Pranks. 

The Symphony warmed up considerably to Shostakovich’s demanding and dynamic Symphony No. 6 – ostensibly a musical portrait of Lenin, but in reality a caricature ranging in styles from sublime to burlesque.  Compared to the neurotic, nearly unhinged playing of the Kirov Orchestra earlier in the week, the well-behaved Pasadena musicians were no less effective in bringing out the architectural grandeur and plumbing the emotional depths of the first-movement Largo.  In the second-movement Scherzo, Maestro Mester delighted in exploring the abrupt tempo and dynamic contrasts.  The splendid finale was launched at full galloping tempo (Shostakovich’s version of the Lone Ranger?) and continued with a CinemaScopic array of special effects, like the perfectly tuned timpani (played expertly by Tom Raney), or the battery of percussions emulating the hilarious cacophony of a vaudeville house (Shostakovich in his film composer mode).  The final rush of sounds hit like a tidal wave.  It was an incredibly exciting performance of a world-class orchestra, right here in Pasadena.


K-Mozart 105.1FM will broadcast this concert on Sunday, November 5, 2006 at 8:00pm.  Visit www.pasadenasymphony.org for information on future concerts.
 

Truman C. Wang is editor-in-chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Pasadena Star-News and other Southern California publications.

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