Review: KSO's season finale builds anticipation

For the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's season finale at the Tennessee Theatre Thursday night, music director Lucas Richman's well-programmed concert moved from the quiet children's storytelling in Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite for Orchestra," written as a piano four-hands piece for child friends and scored for orchestra in 1912, to one of the biggest, loudest and most triumphant endings in all of classical music with Ottorino Respighi's "Pines of Rome," written in 1924.

In the middle was violinist Rachel Lee's engaging performance of Serge Prokofiev's challenging "Concerto No. 2 in G Minor for Violin and Orchestra," Op. 63, written in 1935.

Prokofiev's last composition before returning from Paris to live in Moscow, written in what the Soviet press called Prokofiev's "decadent formalism" shaped by his years of living in the West, the "G Minor Concerto" can ask as much tolerance from the audience as it requires dedication to the musical whole by the musicians.

At times exquisitely lyrical, as in the gorgeous singing by Lee's violin while the orchestra's accompaniment quietly tip-toed in the background in the second movement, its dissonance and angularity, along with the sarcasm in the first and third movements, don't land softly.

Although it was not a piece one enjoys in the usual sense, both Lee and her orchestral associates, under Richman's baton, made it a rewarding and worthy centerpiece for the program.

The shift from Prokofiev's abstraction to Respighi's pictorial, almost realistic tone poems for the second half of the program delivered, I dare say, the kind of music most of the audience had come to hear.

The beginning of the KSO's first performance of the "Fountains of Rome" - written in 1916 - used contemporary harmony and orchestration in ways that were different from both Ravel and Prokofiev.

Structured as portrayals of four Roman fountains seen at the time of day when each was most associated with its setting, it covers the span of a day, beginning at dawn and ending at sunset.

Richman's subtle shaping of the opening moments also recalled the gentleness of the Ravel with which he began the concert.

But it was the second of the tone poems, "Pines of Rome," that gave the orchestra the opportunity to show its stuff from powerful brass playing from the back of the balcony to principal trumpet Cathy Leach's intriguing off-stage solo.

In the middle section there was also an extended, gorgeous clarinet solo played by principal clarinet Gary Sperl.

If this concert was meant as a teaser to the KSO's 75th anniversary season next, it worked very well.

Harold Duckett is a free-lance contributor to the News Sentinel.

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