Long Beach, California / Enero 2009

Tchaikovsky soars to new heights under concertmaster Roger Wilkie

By John Farrell, Special to the Press-Telegram
Posted: 02/02/2009 05:27:24 PM PST

All orchestras have personalities, and, over time, those personalities become easily recognizable, like an old friend's face.

The Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, in the middle of its eighth year under the baton of Music Director Enrique Arturo Diemecke, has such a personality.

There's a sense of family, with a core group of musicians who have played together for years and have become the kind of supportive musical team for which conductors and audiences always hope.

There's a sense of power, as well, for Diemecke has never shied away from the big orchestral sound and its challenges, and the symphony has learned to provide sheer power - elegant power, shimmering power - with the same easy agility a baseball slugger uses to drive a fastball over the wall.

Both the power and the family connection were on display Saturday at the Terrace Theater of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, as Diemecke led his band through an evening of the powerful orchestral delights of three big pieces of music by Tchaikovsky, that late 19th-century master of orchestral passion and instrumental grace.

The family connection was most apparent in the brilliant Violin Concerto, with the orchestra's long-time concertmaster, Roger Wilkie, as soloist.

Diemecke has long made a point of showcasing orchestra principles as soloists, and this wasn't Wilkie's first time in front of the orchestra. It may well have been his best, though. It is hard to remember a performance of this popular concerto, or many others equally as well-known, delivered with such confidence and power and physical presence.
From the start, with his introduction of the moving primary theme of the concerto, it was clear Wilkie's violin was going to rule the performance. His instrument has a powerful, dominant voice that was always strong against even the most powerful orchestral passages, always crisp and bursting with energy.

Equally important was Wilkie's relaxed, almost playful approach to the work. He clearly felt confident in his musical family's support, and in Diemecke's cooperation, and there were moments when he seemed almost casual about rests, plucked notes and passages full of high-speed fingerings and double stops.

It was exhilarating to watch him, sometimes serious, sometimes playful.

His reading of the solo first-movement cadenza was a lengthy moment of bravura technique, surpassing lyricism and deep emotion. Diemecke asks that his audiences not applaud between movements of a work, and they usually respect his wishes, but this first movement provoked applause so lengthy Diemecke had to gesture for quiet before the work continued to its brilliant finish.

The evening opened with the dark-colored tone poem "Francesca da Rimini," a work that calls for a big orchestra and a huge sound, violent and even a bit frightening as Tchaikovsky tells the story of a woman condemned to hell in Dante's "Inferno" for making love to her husband's brother.

An imaginative listener might hear a little autobiography in the work and can't miss the laments of those in the swirling smokes and mist of one of the lowest rings of hell.

Diemecke calls this one of his favorite works, and he led it with precise detail and perfect control.

The evening ended with the composer's "Little Russia" symphony, his second, a work inspired by the Ukraine, known as "Little Russia" then, and filled with tunes that are drawn from or inspired by folk music.

Though the work was written early in his career, it still has all the hallmarks of Tchaikovsky's orchestral writing: brilliant brass passages, shimmering effects in the woodwinds, a rich use of the strings and plenty of powerful but carefully used percussion.

Principal French Horn Joseph Meyer played the daunting and exposed open horn passages with perfection, and the dance-filled third movement was a delight of rhythmic energy.

John Farrell is a Long Beach freelance writer. More of his articles can be read at http://byjohnfarrell.typepad.com.