Brett Campbell writes enthusiastically about the recent Oregon Symphony premiere performances of Tomas Svoboda’s Vortex for Orchestra, as well as the rest of the concert. It’s a nice, tight review, well-written and very nice to see in the pages (web) of the Willamette Week.
The major local work premiered last week, though, was Svoboda’s Vortex for Orchestra, which closed the weekend’s Oregon Symphony concerts. This had to be one of the season’s best shows, not least because they achieved the unlikely feat of keeping me awake in a Brahms symphony, and making a persuasive case that his third isn’t, as sometimes claimed, the runt of the litter. Tight ensemble, luscious sonorities, expressive playing … it was a compelling performance, marred only by a somewhat mannered third movement, but then the orchestra sounds so good these days (especially the cellos and horns here) that it’s easy to understand (if not endorse) music director Carlos Kalmar’s decision to linger on certain plush passages rather than letting the tune unfurl naturally and unsentimentally. Flashy Freddy Kempf played the heck out of Sergei Prokofiev’s whirlwind 1921 Piano Concerto #3, and the orchestra stayed right with him, not least in the piece’s cocky, Jazz Age swagger.
Either of those classics can be a daunting act to follow, but Vortex raised the artistic stakes. Opening with plucked strings, the piece proceeded through punchy brass exclamations, martial piccolo and snare drum, building to a gradual eruption of strings with punchy brass punctuation. Quieting with spiraling-down cello passages played affectingly by Nancy Ives , Vortex exploded into a crossfire of brief brass, cello, percussion and violin volleys, then again subsided to quiet cello and xylophone passages before climaxing in a furious flurry of strings and more. You didn’t need to read the program note to appreciate that Vortex is a contemporary artist’s response to the terrible war and other American crises of the past decade, when the the 69-year-old Portlander composed it. Like most music written in this vein, echoes of Dmitri Shostakovich are hard to avoid, but Svoboda’s original voice resounds. Vortex demands more hearings, and not just in Portland.
Also included in this ‘classical roundup’ is a review of the inaugural Cascadia Composers concert played by FearNoMusic.