Higdon’s a hit

Classical Music

Tom Aldridge

Percussionist Colin Currie performed with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra last weekend.

ISO Classical Series Program No. 17
Hilbert Circle Theatre
March 31-April 1

Jennifer Higdon appears to be a contemporary composer who belies an all-too-expected trend in today’s art-music making: She writes stuff you can actually enjoy on first hearing. Not only enjoy, but savor ... relish, for its advancement of the artform.

Heard last weekend at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s in-vain attempt to compete with the Final Four hordes visiting our city, Higdon’s recently completed Percussion Concerto moved traditional forms into new territory — without losing touch with what’s worked before. Her chosen percussionist, Colin Currie, returned to the Circle stage after having guested in 2002 with the American debut of Michael Torke’s raucously defective Rapture. The Milwaukee Symphony’s music director, Andreas Delfs, was on the podium.

Pounding on everything from a huge marimba to a set of snares — all located in front — Currie shaped the piece as a perfect complement to the orchestra, which included its own set of rear-located percussion. The biggest highlight was Currie’s extended snare-drum solo, reminiscent — to me anyway — of Joe Morello’s even more extended Castilian Drums from the historic Dave Brubeck quartet Carnegie Hall concert of 1962. Yet Higdon’s piece isn’t jazz and has no other allusions to that musical form. Her Percussion Concerto is a significant contribution to new music.

Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90, arguably the finest of his famous four, poses the greatest interpretive challenge: What is the right tempo; is it heroic or lyric; how should it be phrased? Opening the program with it, Delfs didn’t find a satisfactory answer. All four movements emerged as excessively relaxed and seamlessly phrased. Moreover, the various ensembles’ all-too-frequent ragged entrances, coupled with the lack of real interpretive inflections — save for well-wrought dynamic ones — gave the entire symphony the aura of warm molasses strained through a very old brassiere. Brahms’ first-rate material got lost in the miasma.

Delfs concluded with a routine account of Richard Strauss’ Suite to his opera Der Rosenkavalier. Most affecting was the lovely trio that concludes the opera. Strauss appended his Suite, however, with a blustery waltz, which sounds tacked on.

Svetlin Roussev, fourth-place laureate in the 1998 Indy Violin Competition, occupied the concertmaster chair last weekend.

Kang and Trevor team

Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra
Indiana History Center
March 31-April 1

The seventh of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra’s eight season-concerts proved another winner last weekend, providing an easier escape from the myriad masses of out-of-town basketball fans (and we love every one of ’em) jamming the Circle than those attending either of the two simultaneously presented ISO concerts. ICO music director Kirk Trevor was on hand for the return of the 1994 Indianapolis Violin Competition gold medalist Juliette Kang.
Kang, 30, soloed in two selections: Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in E, BWV 1042, and Henri Wieniawski’s Polonaise Brilliante No. 2 in A for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 21. Now associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Kang’s substantial artistry insinuated itself in both selections. As in her competition win, Kang delivered a nicely controlled, even-centered tone as well as an ease of technique, which captured both the Baroque discipline of the Bach and the bravura display of the Wieniawski. Her passage work was effortless and her intonation always on target. Kang remains among the top competition laureates since the event’s 1982 launch.

Trevor opened with a contemporary piece entitled Chieu Huong Giang (An Afternoon on the Perfume River) by film and TV composer Paul Chihara. An American of Japanese ancestry writing ostensibly Chinese music, Chihara, 67, was not only present but gave us a lengthy discourse on what his piece represents — not that it helped. What we heard was a concatenation of many modern styles: pitch glides, some imitative counterpoint, wisps of phrases suggesting Webern-esque serial music and one flute reference to Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Aside from being derivative and eclectic, Giang wasn’t all that bad.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C concluded the concert — a crisp, precisely wrought reading characteristic of what Trevor’s been giving us since the ICO’s move to the IHC.