It begins and ends the same way, simply enough, with four chords from woodwinds building onto each other. Yet, that four chord progression is one of the most magically captivating in all of music history and bookends a beautifully sublime work that has come to define the atmosphere of one of the Bard’s greatest.
Felix Mendelssohn was but 17-years old when he wrote his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first performed by the composer and his sister, Fanny, in a version for two pianos, receiving a brilliant orchestration a year later. It was that sibling relationship, plus the controversial triangle of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, that formed the program for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Masterworks pair this weekend—“Schumann’s Circle of Friends”.
Taking the podium for the week’s concerts was guest conductor Eric Jacobsen, one of the energetic young movers in the American classical music scene who has shown a commitment to altering perceptions of the genre. Jacobsen has been music director of the Orlando Philharmonic since 2015 and, together with his brother, the violinist Colin Jacobsen, formed the freelance orchestra, The Knights, as well as the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, an ensemble familiar to Big Ears Festival audiences.
Throughout the evening, the orchestra seemed to gravitate happily to Jacobsen’s energy, focus, and spirited precision. While there were a few moments of imbalances between sections, one could easily assign this to a guest conductor’s unfamiliarity with the KSO’s lively orchestra shell and the Tennessee Theatre’s warm acoustics.
Continuing the circle that began with the evocatively performed Mendelssohn overture, Jacobsen welcomed pianist Gabriela Martinez for Clara Schumann’s (née Wieck) Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7—premiered in 1835 by the 16-year old Clara herself, and conducted by Felix Mendelssohn and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. For audience members who may have found the performance to be an unusually cohesive and incisive collaboration for guest artists, it was. The pair performed the concerto together with the Orlando Philharmonic last month.
Begun by Clara at age 14 to showcase her own piano performance virtuosity, the concerto is also marked by youthful drama and fresh exuberance, qualities that Martinez captured with an unbelievable ease and abandon. With the middle movement, Romanze, Martinez took its lyricism to a more lyrically exalted plane, aided by solo cello passages played gorgeously by Principal Cello Andy Bryenton.
The circle continued after intermission with the Notturno in G minor by Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny. This work for solo piano was heard here in an arrangement for flute and strings by Christina Courtin, with Principal Flute Hannah Hammel providing a soft and elegant reading and Concertmaster William Shaub contributing a tenderly-played lyrical passage. One is certainly left to consider that if the talented Fanny Mendelssohn had been born in the 20th Century without the gender restrictions she endured in the 19th, how different her story in music history might have been.
Not surprising, Robert Schumann’s Third Symphony (“Rhenish”) took the evening to a place a bit more solemn, yet one with a harmonic grandeur of brass and solidity that supports the ebb and flow of the composer’s programmatic melodic images. Jacobsen and the orchestra kept those melodic images light, bright, lyrical, and spacious, despite the often-discussed weight of the Schumann orchestration.
With each of Schumann’s five movements having a distinctive feel and character, Jacobsen still managed to find a path between them that gave the whole work a sense of symphonic relevance. This is no mean feat for a guest conductor working with an unfamiliar orchestra.
While the Rhenish provides a substantial denouement and climax for a concert, the thematic circle of the evening demanded yet another, a connection to Robert and Clara Schumann—Brahms and his Hungarian Dance No.1. On Friday evening, Jacobsen and the orchestra, full of fire and adrenaline from the dynamic Schumann performance, leapt into the Brahms with a gypsy zeal and passion that sent waves of charged excitement through the hall. And, suddenly, an audience already fully sated, was quite willing to show appreciation for an evening’s journey that truly took them full circle.
