REVIEW: Anchorage Symphony with Naoko Takada

Posted by arts_reviews

Posted: April 27, 2008 - 12:37 am

Next Season Announced

By Mike Dunham

The final Anchorage Symphony Orchestra of this season on Saturday night supplied persuasive incentive to subscribe to the next. The musicians played as well as I’ve ever heard them.

Naoko Takada

The program opened promisingly when Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 found the strings in sync, playing with confidence and accuracy, the winds also on target. Their delicate interweaving of theme and decoration in the second movement and their agile mastery of Haydn’s most famous finale offered some of the best musicianship this season. Only the horns fell short and the minuet could have used some more bounce, but neither quibbles detracted from my enjoyment of an overall happy performance.

The ball kept rolling in the right direction with the Marimba Concerto of American composer Kevin Puts, featuring soloist Naoko Takada. This is the most appealing peace of new music the symphony has played since Philip Munger’s “Chugach” Symphony in 1989.

Puts’ concerto opens with a lovely seven-note motif that reminded me of Samuel Barber; another listener noted a marked resemblance to the Requiem of John Rutter. The tone was thoroughly neo-romantic with few rough spots, perhaps a little Windham Hillish, but with more brains and taste.

Without quite becoming tedious, the seven-note motif got repeated about 50 times in the first movement while the marimba fluttered around it like a dragonfly along a line of flowers. It climaxed into a cadenza that ended quietly, the orchestra vanishing with it, almost as if the composer’s pen had run out of ink.

The second movement was equally alluring and melodic. The finale juxtaposed an energetic moto perpetuo with a grand restatement of the beautiful first movement theme and finished with an effective flourish.

Takada’s technique may not be the best in the profession, but she gave the nearly full house in Atwood Concert Hall their money’s worth by playing several very brief encores that exploited the various voices of the instrument: “Yesterday” (with a few wrong notes), “Flight of the Bumblebee,” “When You Wish Upon a Star” and the theme from “The Pink Panther.”

The orchestra continued to sound superb and fresh in Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” now with the horns catching up to the rest of the sections. Principal trumpet Lynn Weeda did excellent work in his many exposed and solo passages. So did principal horn player Darrel Kincade.

Under conductor Randall Craig Fleischer, the ensemble unity was powerful and seamless while the individual voices — even of lighter instruments like the harps, celeste, triangle — remained distinct. The cut-off of “Gnomus” was built and nuanced in such a way that it felt like a complete piece of music all by itself. “The Great Gate of Kiev” proceeded unrushed and majestic, the battalion of percussion managing to achieve both enormous impact and clarity.

The audience did not give a standing ovation to Takada, but they stood at the end of this.

More Mussorgsky will be included in the all-Russian program that inaugurates the next season, which was announced in Saturday’s program. If the symphony sounds as good in the upcoming evenings as it did this weekend, those tickets will be money well-spent.

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