While Knoxville Symphony Orchestra maestro Aram Demirjian was away on a guest conductor gig with the Santa Rosa Symphony this month, the baton in this week’s KSO Masterworks concerts went to guest conductor Sameer Patel. It had been some eight years since Patel’s last visit with the orchestra in 2014, but his crisp conducting style and a seemingly innate sense of musical narrative was just as satisfying as I remember. What I had forgotten was just how genuinely entertaining and compelling a communicator he is. Describing music—not to mention, the making of it—is not necessarily easy; Patel’s warmth and musical point-of-view make him something of a natural.
Speaking of descriptive…Patel opened the evening with Jennifer Higdon’s, blue cathedral, a 13-minute atmospheric work from 1999 that just may be her most popular, despite her Pulitzer Prize for Music and Grammy Award for her Violin Concerto. Sonic combinations abound: percussion effects shimmer and tinkle, evoking impressions of light, strings dance rhythmically, and woodwinds converse. Written in memory of her brother, there are exposed passages for the clarinet (her brother’s instrument) and the flute (Higdon’s instrument), performed here by Principal Flute Devan Jaquez and Principal Clarinet Gary Sperl.
After the atmospheric Higdon, the Taiwanese-American pianist Weiyin Chen joined Patel and a Mozart-sized orchestra for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25, K. 503. Although not much had been made of it, Ms. Chen was making her U.S. orchestra debut on this concert with the KSO. Given that the piano does not enter for almost three minutes into the opening Allegro movement, I can only imagine the weight of three centuries of musical gravity at such a moment. If there were issues of tempo or communication on Thursday evening, they quickly disappeared, banished into what was a captivating, sparkling, and substantive performance. Friday evening’s performance seemed to go even deeper into Chen’s grasp of that ineffable Mozartian substance that lies beyond the notes on a page—in other words, a composer writing for his own performance. Obviously a skilled musical storyteller, Chen still had plenty of room—and virtuosic technique—for the glistening sparkle of arpeggios that set up and tie together the distinctive and inventive melodic permutations of Mozart.
For some reason, the works of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius haven’t gotten a lot of performances by the KSO over the last 15 years. Based on the orchestra’s thrilling performance and the audience response to his Symphony No. 1 on this week’s concerts, perhaps that is something that should be rectified.
Following the dark, haunting opening by the clarinet (Gary Sperl) and muted timpani (Robert Adamcik), the orchestra responded with a sonic upsurge and the work’s grand structure takes shape—its ebb and flow, its tension and relaxation, all carefully sculpted by conductor Patel. Throughout the four movements, even the audience, which often has a history of giddy applause at inappropriate movement-ending moments of solemn drama, seemed to grasp that this was a narrative that needed to play out unimpeded by interruptions. In a sense, this respect for Sibelius’ destination was made all the more surprising with the finale’s ending pizzicato chords that Patel and the orchestra made appropriately regressive—mezzo-forte, then a final piano. Having quickly absorbed the unconventional ending, the audience, now untethered and un-silenced, gave Patel and the players an extended thank you, before heading off into the February night having had a strangely satisfying experience.
