Music review: Camerata
Season off to a good start
ByPeter Jacobi
October 23, 2007
It was good to see the Camerata back in assemblage for its 19th season Sunday afternoon, this following a tennis injury to founder/concertmaster Lenore Hatfield that brought an early end to the previous one last spring.
The intrepid Hatfield was in her right place up front on stage in Bloomington South’s Carmichael Hall, and to lead the orchestra, she had hired a good choice as guest, Eric Dudley, the 28-year-old assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. In three days of rehearsals, he re-consolidated the more than 70 musicians — IU faculty, students and alums — into an amazingly unified ensemble capable of handling that demanding showpiece of Hector Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique, and then some.
The “then some” included a world premiere overture and the technically forbidding Violin Concerto No. 1 of Prokofiev, which guest soloist Mark Kaplan aced.
The overture opened Sunday’s program, it being Edwin Penhorwood’s for “Too Many Sopranos,” an opera which Bloomington patrons of music had the privilege of seeing earlier this year in a production by the IU Opera Theater. They had seen it without overture, one since crafted by IU-based composer Edwin Penhorwood out of charming tunes from the opera, a delightful send-up of singers and operatic traditions. Dudley and his pliant and obedient players highlighted the wit and buoyancy in the score.
Kaplan, an experienced soloist who now also teaches in IU’s Jacobs School, exhibited mastery of the Prokofiev, the less often performed of the composer’s two violin concertos. He not only nimbly negotiated his way through the technical hurdles of the piece, some of them made the more difficult because of the subtle, almost unassuming, manner in which they should be treated, but found and gloried in the music’s oblique lyricism. Much of the solo violin line in the concerto throbs and trills away at the top of the instrument’s range, which certainly did not make Kaplan’s formidable challenges easier, but he seemed comfortable throughout.
Berlioz’ journey into artistic delirium, the Symphonie fantastique, his reaction to a frustrating bout of love for the actress Harriet Smithson, gained the sort of impassioned reading the score requires, it reflecting the fantasies and nightmares of an overwrought romantic. The symphony also happens to be one of the most exciting and important in the repertoire. Dudley and colleagues gave the piece — an hour’s worth of arresting entanglements — its due. One could question some almost sluggish pacing in the symphony’s slower moments, but the performance as a whole was bracing and appropriately tantalizing, an impressive accomplishment for an orchestra just getting back to business.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
