Rachmaninoff's epic piano concerto highlights FVSO's wonderful evening of music
This concerto is challenging both for the pianist and for the orchestra, and both were up to the challenge.
I recently attended the Fox Valley Symphony’s lush and gorgeous concert at Appleton’s Performing Arts Center. The concert was a great success, and the audience loved it. The first half of the concert showcased Maestro Sütterlin’s capacity for finding beautiful pieces that most of the audience – including me – had never heard. Two of them were by living composers, and of these, "Mariachitlán," by the Mexican-American composer Juan Pablo Contreras, was the most notable. The piece blends elements of Mexican mariachi music with the regular forms of classical symphonic music in a playful and charming way. I loved the piece.
The blend shows clearly the way that immigration has enriched our American culture. "Mariachitlán" brings elements of Mexican folk culture into the American concert hall in a way that could only have been done by a Mexican who had been trained in the United States in the tradition of Western classical music. "Mariachitlán" fits squarely into the tradition of American concert music in a way that makes it easily accessible to American audiences while at the same time increasing their enjoyment by bringing in elements that have not been part of that tradition in the past. Blends of this kind have made our culture one of the richest and strongest in the world.
The first half ended with Samuel Taylor-Coleridge’s Symphonic Variations on an African Air. This is a lovely piece based on a beautiful melody, but although the orchestra performed it beautifully, the piece did not thrill me in the way that "Mariachitlán" did. Perhaps the reason was that I was not ready to hear what Taylor-Coleridge’s piece had to offer. In an encounter between a listener and a piece of music, the listener must be prepared to hear and perhaps I was not prepared.
The second half of the program was Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, played by the Philippine pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion. This concerto is challenging both for the pianist and for the orchestra, and both were up to the challenge. Rachmaninoff was himself a virtuoso pianist with exceptionally large hands, and he wrote a piece that only an exceptional pianist can play. Victor Santiago Asuncion proved that he was such a pianist.
The concerto also includes a large and challenging role for the orchestra, and our orchestra showed that it was up to the challenge. In some concertos, the orchestra functions mainly as an accompaniment to the soloist who carries most of the burden of the music. This concerto is not such a piece. The orchestra is as important as the soloist, and our orchestra did not disappoint. Under the inspired direction of Maestro Sütterlin, it gave a wonderful performance, and the audience’s applause showed its appreciation.
