Entertainment News 

Symphony Goes to Early Works
Monday, October 29, 2007
by CLIFTON J. NOBLE JR. 
Music writer 

2007 The Republican Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission of The Republican http://www.repub.com

GREENFIELD - Performances of music by Barber, Bernstein and Puccini marked the auspicious beginning of the Pioneer Valley Symphony's 69th season Saturday evening at the Greenfield High School auditorium.

The season's theme, "Youthful Visions," was reflected in the programming of works that emerged very early in their composers' careers.

PVS Music Director Paul Phillips launched the concert with a vivacious account of Samuel Barber's Overture to "The School for Scandal," premiered in the same year that the composer attracted favorable attention by singing the first performance of his setting of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" for baritone and string quartet.

The PVS strings dug into Barber's spiky opening subject with bow-swinging vigor, and his elegant second theme soared, first from Tamara Field's oboe and later from Joanne Nelson-Unczur's English horn.

A playing and conducting tour-de-force brought the concert to intermission, in the form of Leonard Bernstein's ballet "Fancy Free."

An ebullient composition prefiguring Bernstein's musical melting-pot of rigorous structural command and brash, unbuttoned vernacular material that would come to a glorious boil in "West Side Story" and "Candide," "Fancy Free" represented the 25-year-old composer's first collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins.

In an over-the-top orchestral showcase, Bernstein's music whipped players and director through a joyous maelstrom of mutating meters, impish accents, and throbbing, capering excitement and intensity.

When the dust settled, Phillips recognized principal brass and woodwind players and pianist Gary Steigerwalt for their significant, rock-solid solo efforts, but the whole ensemble could honestly bask in the applause rewarding their heads-up, risk-taking music-making that made up in enthusiasm what little it may have lacked in precision.

Sitting down at the piano to accompany baritone soloist Anton Belov, Phillips prefaced the orchestral music of "Fancy Free" with "Big Stuff," (recorded by a raft of singers from Bernstein to Billie Holiday, for whom it was written) which he introduced as the song supposedly playing on the jukebox at the outset of the ballet itself.

The evening's final musical offering brought together the PVS with the Pioneer Valley Symphony Chorus, prepared by its new director, Lisa Jablow, and soloists Alan Schneider (tenor) and Anton Belov (baritone) in Giacomo Puccini's "Messa a 4 voci."

Another product of a creator in his early 20s, the "Messa" offered glimmers (the poignant yearning span of the "Kyrie" and the delicious tenor-baritone duet in the "Agnus Dei") of the melodist who would pen "O mio babbino caro," but who still labored under the harmonic influence of Verdi (as Beethoven's early works peered from Haydn's shadow).

The chorus declaimed the Latin text with spirit and sincerity, negotiating Puccini's at times awkwardly accented setting with aplomb, and relishing the complexity of his youthful fugatos. Phillips maintained a salubrious balance between the lush, colorful orchestration and the chorus' exuberant delivery.

Schneider applied his creamy, full-throttle tenor to the "Gratias agimus tibi" and "Et incarnatus est," reminding this reviewer of his triumphant Commonwealth Opera performance as Rinuccio in Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" in 2000, one of Schneider's own "Youthful Visions."

Belov brought a commanding tone and fluid legato to bear in the dark "Crucifixus" and the calm and hopeful "Benedictus."

Saturday's concert affirmed that Phillips and the PVS have once again crafted a season of engaging, interesting and worthy repertoire to which this fine community orchestra can apply its considerable talents with admirable results.

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