We’ll probably look back on 2023 as something of a threshold year. With the pandemic restrictions and precautions fading into a dusty corner of our concert-going memory, we embraced the idea that a combination of luck and perseverance, not to mention medical technology, had brought us through. As I opined in the preface to last year’s Most Memorable list, the concert-going experience is evolving, both in the mechanics of attending and in how organizations promote music and attract audiences.
What hasn’t changed is that we still love to highlight and admire the year’s Most Memorable performances with a satisfied feeling of completion. Of course, that emotion inevitably turns to hopefulness and optimism as the calendar flips over to 2024 and we await what the New Year has in store for us.
Cue the trumpet fanfare—here are the Arts Knoxville choices for Most Memorable Classical Music Performances of 2023. As last year, we have avoided categories and offer the list in reverse chronological order from the more recent to the earliest in the Knoxville music scene.
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Knoxville Symphony Orchestra: Rachmaninoff and Ives (November 2023)
With KSO Maestro Aram Demirjian taking the week off for the birth of his daughter, KSO Resident Conductor James Fellenbaum was on the podium for an anxiously awaited performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with pianist Alessio Bax.
From the November Arts Knoxville review:
“Although later works gave Ives the reputation for cacophony and multi-tonal dissonance, the five-movement Second Symphony was a delightful two-pronged journey for the KSO players—European Romantic era solidity, interwoven with suggestions of gospel tunes, hymns, and popular songs often inserted and flavored by the woodwinds.”
On the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3:
“On Friday evening’s performance, Bax took that theme with a subtle and gentle touch of character, leaving room for the ensuing drama—percussive octave statements and delicate, crystalline runs, that give way later to a judiciously applied rubato in the lyrical passages, and in the cadenza.”
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Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Conductor Aram Demirjian: Violinist Stefan Jackiw in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy/KSO in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (October 2023)
From the Arts Knoxville review:
“Let’s be honest. Violinist Stefan Jackiw is in a category of world class artists that, for budget reasons, we are rarely able to hear live in Knoxville concert halls. While his amazingly focused sound is crystalline, brilliant, and satisfying, he shapes passages with interpretative elegance and nuance. On a microscopic level, individual notes bloomed with dynamic surprises that ran the gamut from unbelievably soft to fiery, buttered with just the right amount of vibrato; trills seemed to have dimension, while in the big picture, his narrative style was a masterpiece of musical storytelling that embraced Scottish folk tunes and Bruch’s Germanic underpinning.”
Arts Knoxville writer Diana Salesky also put Stefan Jackiw at the top of her list, adding “We just don’t get artists of that stature here very often…”
This oh-so memorable concert concluded with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony:
“Despite the recent Beethoven 250 celebration, it has been some years since the KSO performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”). That being the case, it arrived with Demirjian (conducting without a score) and the KSO at the Tennessee Theatre like a breath of fresh, country air.”
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University of Tennessee Symphony Orchestra (Fall 2023)
It’s a bit difficult to categorize the many successes that converged this fall on the UT Symphony Orchestra under conductor James Fellenbaum. With Fellenbaum celebrating 20 years as Conductor and Director of Orchestras at the UT College of Music, it was announced in November that UTSO had won the 2023 American Prize in Orchestral Performance for larger college/university programs.
The orchestra, now taking on some challenging heavyweights of the repertoire, performed an October concert of Sibelius’ Finlandia, Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A Minor with cellist Wesley Baldwin, concluding with Johannes Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn. In September, New York Philharmonic Concertmaster Frank Huang was guest soloist with UTSO in the Sibelius Violin Concerto in a concert that also included Ottorino Respighi’s “Fountains of Rome.” As the pit orchestra for the UT Opera Theatre, the subset UT Opera Orchestra under conductor Kevin Class turned in a noteworthy performance in the November double bill of The Medium and Suor Angelica.
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KSO: Pictures at an Exhibition, Conductor Aram Demirjian (September 2023)
“As a whole and as parts, this [Pictures At An Exhibition] was a marvelously solid and tightly rendered performance with sculpted snap, boom, and velvet moved along by chosen tempos that pushed and pulled at the listener … Trumpet Brian Winegardner captured the intricacies of “Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle” with marvelous agility.”
The concert also included Adam Schoenberg’s Picture Studies and Alexander Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto that showcased Canadian-born William Leathers as guest soloist.
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Violinist William Shaub in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (September 2023)
From the Arts Knoxville review:
“Sunday’s performance by Shaub was masterful in both technical agility and sheer entertainment value. His handling of the Adagio was a beautiful example of recognizing the composer’s “complex simplicity” that disguises its difficulty and sophistication with innocence.“
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Amadeus Chamber Ensemble: “Mozart! An Operatic Feast” and “Rossini”
The Amadeus Chamber Ensemble (ACE) is filling a niche in Knoxville’s music scene with its delightful survey journeys into the operatic and sacred works of familiar composers, supported by a full orchestra, chorus, and soloists.
From the Arts Knoxville review of “Mozart! An Operatic Feast”—
“For nearly two hours, the near-capacity audience for Sunday evening’s presentation in the Cathedral Concert Series at Sacred Heart Cathedral dined on a varied menu of fifteen selections from Mozart operas … Serving up this feast was a beautifully balanced quintet of soloists: sopranos Maria Brea and Jacqueline Brecheen; mezzo-soprano Kara Cornell; tenor Kirk Dougherty; and baritone Aaron Keeney. The Amadeus Chamber Ensemble Orchestra and Chorus were under the direction of Maestro Brian Salesky.”
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Cathedral Concert Series: Violinist William Shaub in Strauss’ Sonata for Violin and Piano (July 2023)
In her Arts Knoxville review, Diana Salesky wrote:
“Every once in a while, one hears a performance in which the connection between performers and composer is in perfect unity. Such was the case when violinist William Shaub and pianist Kevin Class took on the complex and challenging Sonata for Violin and Piano by Richard Strauss in Sunday’s Cathedral Concert Series … Strauss was a musical wizard, seemingly able to evoke the innocence of young love, the depravity of unbridled lust, the desire for the heroic, and the longing for eternity – all of which were beautifully captured in this performance by both Shaub and Class.”
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Marble City Opera: Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah (June 2023)
Although Marble City Opera is no stranger to the outdoors for its productions, these performances of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah at the atmospheric Marble Springs State Historic Site in South Knox County took on a special sense of time and place. From the Arts Knoxville review:
“There is an ineffable sense of magic in theatre that is performed outdoors, particularly when accomplished at twilight in a natural setting as the fading light and ambient sounds of nighttime take hold. Marble City Opera has taken advantage of this magic in its immensely effective and touching outdoor production of Susannah”
…In the title role was soprano, and MCO executive artistic director, Kathryn Frady, who excelled beautifully in the two sides of the character…
…David Crawford was brilliant as the hypocritical preacher Olin Blitch, in a performance that uses his incredibly rich and powerful bass-baritone as the focal point in the church scene, and in the wrenching dramatic deviousness of his “seduction” of Susannah.”
“Making use of the last rays of sun and the “golden hour,” director Matthew Haney has the action—plus the excellent 22-member orchestra led by conductor Andy Anderson, as well as the audience—move between two spots on the site: a pavilion as the town’s church and a pioneer era cabin used as the home of Susannah and her brother Sam, along with other scenes.”
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KSO Chamber Classics: Oboists Claire Chenette and Ayca Yayman in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Oboes in D minor (May 2023)
This May Chamber Classics concert wrapped up the series’ season with a bang.
“…deserving of that spotlight were KSO Principal Oboe Claire Chenette and KSO Second Oboe Ayca Yayman, who brilliantly handled the Vivaldi and Viet Cuong works back to back. The traditional virtuosity of Chenette and Yayman in the Vivaldi was matched in Extra(ordinarily) Fancy with an embrace of the free-wheeling spirit of the work and its willingness to bend rules. The composer explored the use of “multiphonics” that are created when the oboe performer uses incorrect fingering to create a squawking effect with multiple pitches. “
Conductor Aram Demirjian and the orchestra also delivered a clever, crisp, and energetic performance of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.
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KSO: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (May 2023)
This finale concert of the 2022-23 season featured Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, prompting this deserving praise in our review:
“This performance by Demirjian and the orchestra—beautiful in its restrained savagery—was a satisfying example of an excellent ensemble at work, focused on creating a meaningful musical narrative out of Stravinsky’s complex and hauntingly violent score.”
The performance also included pianist Zhenni Li-Cohen who joined Maestro Aram Demirjian and the KSO for an emotional Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
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Knoxville Opera: The Marriage of Figaro (April 2023)
“…this production of The Marriage of Figaro was a hands-down, solid triumph for Knoxville Opera. Directed by Eve Summer, the staging embraced the energetic, madcap scenario that Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, created in 1786. … leading the [Knoxville Symphony Orchestra] from the “harpsichord” upstage was conductor Laurie Rogers. Her pacing was beautifully consistent, providing a springboard for the comedy and the dramatic flow of entrances and exits. Clearly, Rogers and Summer deserve kudos for this production’s energy and comic sparkle.”
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Pianist Chih-Long Hu and UT Symphony Orchestra: Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (February 2023)
In a concert that honored the 80th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s last public recital in Knoxville and the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, UT faculty pianist Chih-Long Hu joined conductor James Fellenbaum and the UTSO for a spirited performance of Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. Also on the concert—noted Russian violinist and conductor, Victor Yampolsky, was guest conductor for Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.
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Best wishes for Happy Holidays from Arts Knoxville!
