A collision of the present and the future occurred on the stage of the Tennessee Theatre this weekend—an experience that was noticeably transformative for both performers and audience. The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and its Knoxville Symphony Youth Orchestra performed separately and together in an evening that also featured an exciting contemporary American composer and a guest violinist that charmed the audience with her personality and performance.
The title of the evening was “The New World”, referring both to the presence of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”) on the program and to the significance of America as a place of opportunity for all. To that end, KSO music director Aram Demirjian opened the concert with Rachel Grimes’ Book of Leaves, an orchestrated version of three pieces from her solo piano suite of the same name.
A Kentucky native, Grimes is actually no stranger to Knoxville, having performed on several Big Ears Festival seasons and is expected back for the 2019 festival in March. However, what was most inspiring about this Book of Leaves was Grimes’ obvious gift for exhilarating and captivating orchestration, transforming the personal nature of a solo piano into a work of expansive depth and textural color. Grimes succeeds in maintaining the minimalist charm and rhythmic addictiveness while opening up passages with layers of string and woodwind textures. The opening of the second movement, “The Corner Room,” had an especially satisfying string passage, taken in turn by the four principal strings.
“The New World” was also applicable to Demirjian’s next choice for the evening, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The Austrian-born Korngold was lured to Hollywood by director Max Reinhardt to arrange and expand Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a film score. Trapped by WWII, Korngold continued working in Hollywood through the war, only returning to non-film composition in 1945. The Korngold Violin Concerto was premiered by the St. Louis Symphony in 1947 with Jascha Heifetz as soloist.
Admittedly, the Violin Concerto has had its critics, particularly in the couple of decades following its premiere, with one notable critic proclaiming it “more corn than gold.” Nevertheless, the work has become favored by violinists who understand the fine line between lyrical storytelling and overdone romanticism.
The guest violinist for the Korngold, Tessa Lark, possessed that understanding and promptly proceeded to charm the socks off of the KSO audience with a performance that was equal parts technical skill, virtuosity, passion, and eloquent storytelling. In full command of the G.P. Maggini violin, Lark used the instrument’s warm edge to trace the contours of the Korngold score, using the episodic nature of the themes derived from film scores to her advantage.
Also a Kentucky native, Lark regularly moves afield from classical music, performing bluegrass and jazz with a number of collaborators. While in Knoxville, Lark performed on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special. As an encore, Lark offered a bluegrass number—with vocals, no less.
The collision with the future “New World” came on the second half of the program with the Knoxville Symphony Youth Orchestra claiming the stage for a performance of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance Op. 46, No. 1. While the KSYO has regular performances of their own, this was probably an introduction to the ensemble for many in the KSO’s Masterwork audience. Importantly, the audience was able to hear first hand the level of accomplishment of the group under director James Fellenbaum and sense the importance of this aspect of the orchestra’s program for the future of classical music.
Following the KSYO performance, the KSO returned to the stage for the Dvořák Symphony No. 9, but was now augmented with select players from the KSYO in a side-by-side arrangement. With the overall performance forces increased by a third, the Dvořák had plenty of oomph where oomph was needed. And oomph there was.
Despite having its own vocal critics like composer Amy Beach and Leonard Bernstein relating to thematic authenticity, the “New World” Symphony is arguably Dvořák’s most popular work. Part of this popularity can be traced to the fact that the symphony carries itself with a sense of drama and theatricality, an underpinning that Demirjian quite consciously exploited with determination—and with help from the expanded numbers.
The second movement, the famous Largo with its iconic English horn solo, opens with its own drama, seven somewhat ominous chords from the woodwinds and brass that swell to a roll of thunder from the timpani, revealing a reflecting pool of strings that poignantly set up the theme. That wistful theme was given a beautiful tenderness and an open tonal expansiveness by principal English horn Elizabeth Telling. The movement also featured notable work by flutes Amy Orsinger Whitehead (subbing for Hannah Hammel) and Jill Bartine, oboe Claire Chenette, and horn Jeffery Whaley.
The finale movement takes drama to a head, and with it came fine playing from the horn section, brass, and woodwinds. The conclusion builds in strength and drama, its final chord a sublime moment of intensity, with strings and low brass dropping away leaving woodwinds, horns, and trumpet in a remarkable decrescendo to silence. Demirjian stretched this magical moment, giving it an intense drama that could only be relieved with thunderous applause from a thankful audience.
