Symphony strikes high note
By Jeff Mannix -
Special to the Herald
February 24, 2004
Sunday's performance of the San Juan Symphony at the Community Concert Hall can be summed up no more accurately than this: It was absolutely stunning.
The afternoon was filled with such musical richness by the program selection of music director Arthur Post, the talent displayed by the orchestra, the Durango Choral Society and four featured soloists. They combined toelevate classical music in the Four Corners to a new level of excellence - a level where we can take the musicianship for granted and concentrate on the nuance and plenitude of the compositions.
This is a significant milestone in the life of the San Juan Symphony - one that was not reached on one Sunday afternoon, of course, but had been building for many years - and with this past weekend's performances in Farmington and Durango, it has secured the height of the bar beyond even the most optimistic enthusiast's expectations.
Post's enlightened program was constructed around the theme of "Heaven and Earth," inspired by the spiritual oneness of biblical and religious works juxtaposed to the earthbound spectacle of life itself.
The orchestra opened with the lyrical and uncharacteristically delicate "Good Friday Spell" from Richard Wagner's "Parsifal," written as a festival play in 1882, one year before the composer's death in Venice, Italy. Wagner viewed "Parsifal" as a new beginning of harmonic compositions. Post's sensitivity to what Wagner himself called "harmonic animation" radiated through the orchestra confidently and with subdued elan.
Osvaldo Golijov's "Muertes Del Angel" was a lilting, modern composition by a living Argentine composer, dedicated as a tribute to Astor Piazzolla, the last great composer of the tango. The music was simply elegant in composition and beautifully played by nine of the orchestra's stringed instruments standing in a semicircle.
Closing the first half of the concert, 17-year-old Brandon Lee attacked the Steinway in Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 1." Lee was awarded two gold medals for the solo and the concerto divisions in the 2003 Four Corners Piano Competition in Durango. The young man's ability pierced the atmosphere in the hall with a maturity well beyond his years. He was splendid, and the orchestra created the full palette of Russian verbosity for Lee to scurry around.
Following an intermission, Mr. Post tackled his most ambitious piece yet: Franz Josef Haydn's "The Creation." This performance resonated with most extraordinary talent from a stage filled with a full orchestra, one-hundred voices of the Durango Choral Society, and the crystalline solo voices of soprano Gemma Kavanaugh, tenor Max Miller and baritone Steve Olivares. It was a sumptuous feast of aural display that won't be forgotten by anyone in attendance, including the musicians. The complexity of the performance was numbing. The chorale was up to task. And the San Juan Symphony orchestra lived up to the reputation the devoted audience always knew it was destined for.
