REVIEW: Anchorage Symphony

Posted by arts_reviews

Posted: February 23, 2008 - 11:37 pm

By Mike Dunham

Lowell Liebermann ranks among the very few living composers whom I will go out of my way to hear. Saturday night, Feb. 23, the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra presented his new Third Piano Concerto, Op. 95calling it the "Pacific Northwest Premiere." The ASO is among 18 orchestras who joined to commission Liebermann to write a follow-up to his successful Second Concerto; each has some claim on the "premiere" designation, though it was first heard almost two years ago.

The piece opens with some thunder of the "Todentanz" variety. There's a series of flashy piano cadenzas before the most identifiable theme shows up, softly and slowly in the strings, an arching, aching B minor melody that is thoroughly parceled and pummeled for the rest of the movement. Liebermann's style is neo-romantic with furiously difficult - but often riviting - passages for the pianist. The battering of the keys reminds one of Prokofiev; the thick, often contrapuntal texture teeters between tonality and studied dissonance reminiscent of Max Reger.

Tunewise, the music mostly resembles the latter, which means it's not all that memorable. I've heard the piece twice now and won't be whistling any part of in the shower. But I will recall the big clean triad chords that are used at key climactic points in the first two movements with excellent effect. The slow movement, in which a poignant line in the strings is juxtaposed with a kind of tick-tock accompaniment from the piano, is probably the most ingratiating and thoughtful section.

The finale, titled "Burlesque," has a recurring tarantella rhythm and frantic pace and even a obligatory fughetta tossed in. Its trajectory gets interupted near the end by an odd ragtime intrustion that seems startlingly out-of-place and not particularly original or imaginative. The close comes suddenly after that.

The audience was fairly enthusiastic, but pianist Jeffrey Biegel didn't wait to test their response. At his second curtain call he sat down and hurled out a knuckle-popping encore, titled - I kid you not - "Rush Hour in Hong Kong," by American teacher and pianist Abram Chasins.

Biegle is a generous musician, busily promoting new music and rarities. He's made popularizing this concerto his mission and, who knows, after a third hearing he may convince me. About his accuracy, energy and prowess with trills, scales, cascading chords and the rest of the munitions in the pianistic armory, there can be no doubt.

Also distinguishing themselves in the Liebermann were trumpeter Lynn Weeda and horn player Darrel Kincade, both of whom had several places where they were prominently exposed and where they consistently acquitted themselves marvelously.

The brass had their work cut out for them in the concert finale, Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3. Conductor Randall Fleischer did a commendable job of nuancing the voices and counterpoint in the first movement. But by the end of the clog-dancing second movement, the horns, trumpets and trombones were starting to fray. This presents a problem since the final quarter hour of this long piece, based on Copland's hit "Fanfare for the Common Man," depends on the brass recurrently belting out iterations of the basic overtone scale at full lung. The strings also had grown slightly wobbly by then.

Happily, Weeda, Kincade et al. survived, ably assisted, particularly, by the higher winds, though their faces had the color of cranberries.

Unhappily, the opening piece, Leopold Stokowski's masterful orchestration of J.S. Bach's equally masterful Tocca and Fugue in D Minor, felt undersold, as if both the players and the conductor were holding back for the hurdles that awaited them.

Those are my thoughts. If you were there, add your take here.

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