Review: Shaham, Walton, Graf in evening of muscle and mystery at Houston Symphony

Friday, February 4th, 2011 - 7:34 am - Fun Entertainment Life

The weekend Houston Symphony concerts featuring Sir William Walton’s Violin Concerto have one of those cannily rewarding and illuminating programs that music director Hans Graf excels in (as does next weekend’s all-Ravel evenings).

With Gil Shaham soloing brilliantly in one of the second-tier works he loves to promote, as he did in an engaging video introduction, Graf chose a second English work, Sir Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, that created a SparkNotes survey of 20th-century English orchestral music.

Walton was a conservative, open to the blandishments of French Impressionism and post-Romantic German composers but fundamentally heartfelt in his allegiance to traditional harmony.

Britten, in contrast, was fundamentally tonal but eagerly willing to utilize all kinds of dissonance to express his ideas. Combined, the two strains pretty well sum up the styles driving most of the great music composed in England in the first three quarters of the century. (Walton’s lifespan encompassed all of Britten’s.)

Shared traits emerged, such as the insistent, dramatic pulse-driven intensity of Britten’s first movement that evolved in a similarly vivid section in Walton’s first. And, in the battle between the moods represented, if not symbolized, by major and minor keys, Walton was triumphantly hopeful in the progression of his work. Britten, writing just before World War II, left the listener on a limb at the end of his first movement.

Shaham is an engaging and wonderfully skillful performer. A hint of shyness or reticence added to the allure of his onstage persona (though no player of his level is a wallflower). At the end, I realized I had encountered a goose-bump experience — an event to remember.

Similarly Graf and the orchestra presented Sinfonia da Requiem with precision and commitment – no grand showiness but skillful intensity.

One of the pleasures of my retirement is not listening to Beethoven symphonies (especially the usual suspects), but the Seventh received a powerful, probing account filled with muscle and mystery.

The accumulating intensity created by the ascending scales of the long introduction again recalled the similar moments in the earlier works, but the playing moved to a well-regulated balance of power and delicacy. Especially rewarding was the way the lower strings performed the variations theme opening the funereal second-movement.

With its taut structure, driving fortes and refined soft moments, the interpretation was a reminder of why Graf, who will leave the symphony after the 2012-13 season, will continue to be welcomed back to major American orchestras.

Rest In Fun