Hill resident leads thrilling Orchestra concert

By MICHAEL CARUSO

Chestnut Hill resident Ignat Solzhenitsyn led the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in the opening concert of its 2004-05 season Sunday afternoon in the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater. The Chamber Orchestra, of which Solzhenitsyn is the music director and principal conductor, offered a program that was effectively put together and showed the ensemble to be in excellent music condition. Sad to say, a similarly constructed concert heard the previous evening across Commonwealth Plaza in Verizon Hall was far less successful.

Sunday afternoon's concert proved several important points; one is that the time-tested formula of overture-concerto-symphony can still be thrillingly efficacious if the three scores are compelling and complementary pieces of music and if they receive inspired and masterful renditions. That was assuredly the case with the Overture to Cherubini's opera, Medee, Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Opus 107, and Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 56. It was even more splendidly self-evident regarding the performances these three works received from the Chamber Orchestra and guest cellist Steven Isserlis, all under Solzhenitsyn's baton.

Even the most avid opera fan has encountered only a few performances of Cherubini's Medee, a work almost totally forgotten until the late diva Maria Callas came upon it in the 1950s and brought it temporarily back into notice. Whatever the full opera's weaknesses, its overture is a striking work of balanced lyricism and drama that boasts a strong structure and brilliant orchestration. Solzhenitsyn gave dramatic justice to the former and dealt with the latter with a surprisingly sensitive ear to texture.

Isserlis, whose over-the-top romanticism tends to turn me off in the romantic repertoire, couldn't have been bettered in the Shostakovich. He projected the solo line of the first movement with firmness but without harshness, invigorating its lyricism with energy and phrasing its intensity with melodic shape.

By ending the program with Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, Solzhenitsyn both reminded his audience of the composer's seminal place in early romantic music and assured it that the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia is playing better than ever.

PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA

Saturday night's concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra looked very good on paper. It just didn't turn out that way in concert. The orchestra's first performance of Augusta Reed Thomas' Trainwork, Strauss' Don Quixote with cellist Daniel Muller-Schott, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in G major, Opus 88, should have made a persuasive case for the continued validity of the traditional concert format. Instead, they wore me out well before the program's conclusion.

Thomas' Trainwork -- and "no," it doesn't deserve the epithet "Trainwreck" -- just isn't very interesting. It sounds like the score of many a scene in many a film. But without the cinematic image up there on the screen to hold your interest, the music on its own simply doesn't do it. Even David Cramer's fine playing of the important solo flute line couldn't save this train from getting lost somewhere along the tracks well before reaching its final destination.

Muller-Schott may be an effective cellist when heard in a smaller venue than Verizon Hall, but he never managed to offer a tone sufficient in amplitude to deliver the expansive narrative line given the cello in Strauss' musical rendition of Cervantes' immortal seeker of idealism, Don Quixote. You know you're in serious trouble when an orchestra's principal violist -- in this case, Roberto Diaz -- does far more with the supporting role of Sancho Panza than the cellist does with the title character. You're also in trouble when the conductor -- in this case, Christoph Eschenbach -- presides over an orchestral introduction so flaccid that it would cause you to put down the book forever after struggling through no more than the first page.

ACOUSTICAL MAKEOVERS

The weekend's concerts got me thinking about acoustics. The stage of Perelman Theater was thrust out over the pit for Sunday's concert by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, bringing the musicians farther out into the audience's part of the hall and thereby offering a more immediate and effective sonic experience as well as offering the ensemble more room for its players. Although the ceiling and wall panels in Verizon Hall were set in a different configuration from that used last season, the acoustical results were pretty much the same. The house still lacks presence. You can hear the playing, but you can't feel it.