by David Perkins

Springfield, MA, 13 October 2008.  At an age when “firsts” seem to come a little less often for me – though I have a few to go: my first view of the Taj Mahal, my niece’s first performance on Broadway, my first Nobel Prize – it was a pleasure to have a first encounter with the Springfield Symphony on Saturday night. 

It’s an impressive band.  I was struck, most of all, by the string playing, which was cultivated and full-bowed, so essential in a program of late-Romantic works, and the general intensity and commitment in a long, tiring program.  The orchestra was obviously giving 150 percent, and a second-tier orchestra playing at 150 percent is worth twice as much as a first-tier orchestra giving 75 percent.  It’s fortunate, perhaps, that the Springfield Symphony doesn’t play so often that it forgets it loves the music.  

Springfield’s Symphony Hall is a dry space, with almost no reverberation, and that has at least one virtue: It encourages the orchestra to play with great precision.  The quality of the strings, moreover, is wonderfully dark and grainy, a kind of polished red mahogany, with darker whorls from cellos and double-basses, quite unlike the shiny, platinum-blond quality of the Boston Symphony’s strings (No doubt you have your own metaphors).  Partly, I suspect, this coloring is an effect of the hall.  Thank goodness, no music director has made a fetish of smoothness.  The blend we get is the blend of a shared expressive purpose.   

The woodwinds and French horns made a less positive impression. Set up in a kind of vertical block at the back, with the rest of the brass grouped to their left, they sounded fine, but a bit distant.  The horns did not penetrate during their important moments at the end of the Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 43.  The trumpets were, by contrast, almost uncomfortably bright.  Nor of course does the hall allow the orchestra to create a great chrysanthemum-burst of sound at the biggest climaxes; that will never happen.  Still, it would be worth experimenting with seating, and testing a shell or risers, to improve the projected sound of the back choirs of the orchestra.

In the second program of its season, music director Kevin Rhodes chose three late-Romantic works by Brahms, Elgar, and Sibelius, all composed within a 30 year period.  All have a sensuousness and passion that expresses itself in great, warm-hearted melodies, but at the same time, they share a hunger for something beyond sensuousness, and beyond the dominant influence of the day, Wagner.  You could call this a retro-classicism.  Their answers to this struggle, however, are individual.

After a grand reading of Brahms’ Tragic Overture, Op. 81 (less often heard than the showier Academic Festival Overture), we heard Elgar’s Cello concerto in e, Op. 85, with Matt Haimovitz as soloist: a double treat.  Haimovitz is a widely admired musical evangelist who splits his schedule between orchestral and club appearances.  (He taught for several years at UMass-Amherst, and now makes his home in Montreal with his wife, the composer Luna Pearl Woolf.)  He played sensitively, precisely, and with lovely tone.  There could perhaps have been more give-and-take with the conductor.  There are many tricky ensemble challenges in this piece, and Rhodes was intent on cuing the orchestra rather than working with the cellist, who instead made eye contact with the concertmistress.   

Rhodes seemed on top of every detail, and always respectful of the music.  He gets on and off the podium like a bouncy Labrador (he seemed almost to crush Haimovitz in an embrace, and ended the concert on one knee to his players).  While conducting, however, it’s never about him, and that’s a treasurable thing. On the other hand, he probably conducts too much, cuing each entrance, coddling each phrase, rather than holding a sense of the whole work in his mind and letting the players come to him.  As a result, the music seemed to emerge in blocks, rather than as arches or spans; often, there would be a dissipating pause before the onset of a new idea.  Nor did he always pick an effective high point for each movement: the first reprise of that to-die-for melody in the Sibelius’ final movement, for example, was so gorgeously emphatic, the very last iteration was anticlimactic.

This was an ambitious program, and the violins, especially, never got a rest. It was really their evening.