Featured work of the evening, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Conductor Donato Cabrera pulled out all the stops for this one, especially in the finale for which he took all the repeats. The result, with the orchestra at full roar, was Mozart the Mighty Conqueror, fully the equal of Beethoven or any of the other heroes who came after.
Far gentler, Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, with the tall and elegant Meng Su playing a crisp and elegant solo guitar. Rodrigo was very careful to ensure the orchestra never drowns out the guitar, and these performers were equally sure to observe his wishes.
Gentler still, Breathe by the increasingly ubiquitous Carlos Simon, a ten-minute exercise in meditation. Fortunately it didn’t try to reproduce the experience of breathing itself, concentration on which I find hideously uncomfortable and is the reason I dislike meditation. Instead, it featured a steady sheen of sound, but nothing spectralist or minimalist, but with fragments of melody on top, some lyric but some rather jangly. At times it sounded like the music of a quiet and peaceful jungle, possibly the one in which the lion sleeps tonight.
Subscribers found at our seats a card with a QR code and its associated URL, thank you, which on inspection proved to lead to a brief video of Cabrera announcing that next season will include Gershwin’s American in Paris, eh, and the obscure discovery of the season, Borodin’s Second Symphony. OK, granted that the Borodin is criminally underplayed, but if he really wants a totally obscure but worthwhile 19C Russian symphony, how about Kalinnikov’s First, which I’ve actually heard a lot of recently, or Balakirev’s First?
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