SA Symphony with Nancy Zhou
A promising début in the Sibelius concerto
January 16, 2010It’s one thing for a 17-year-old violinist to play the Sibelius Concerto in D Minor with technical security. It’s quite another for one so young to bring a personal style to this music, and to play it convincingly.
Happily, Nancy Zhou falls into the “quite another” category. A student at San Antonio's elite Keystone School, Zhou chose the Sibelius concerto for her professional début, with the San Antonio Symphony on Jan. 15 under artistic advisor Christopher Seaman. A gratifyingly large number of the violinist’s contemporaries surrounded my seat in the Majestic Theatre’s mezzanine.
Zhou projected a deeply warm, velvet, focused tone, with a gleaming top and a sultry low register, the latter sometimes bothered by a too-wide vibrato in the concerto's slow movement. Zhou brought a fine sense of foreboding to first movement's opening statement and aptly dramatic punctuation to the elaborate cadenza. The finale’s brilliant passages came off crisply. Most intriguing and distinctive was Zhou’s diction -- precise, curiously exotic (reminding me at times of Eartha Kitt!) and given sometimes to surprising but musically appropriate emphases. For her solo encore, she dashed off a whiz-bang Paganini caprice with complete assurance.
Seaman and the orchestra offered two works from opposite ends of the Romantic spectrum -- Tchaikovsky’s dark, feverish “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy and Mendelssohn’s cool, elegant Symphony No. 5 in D, “Reformation.” Apart from a few imprecise attacks in the Tchaikovsky, both were well put together, as one expects from Seaman. In Mendelssohn he got an agreeably transparent sound from the strings, the lines were nicely shaped, and the tempos were good, if sometimes too strict, but he could do nothing to counter the impression that this music, like much of Mendelssohn’s, leaves behind -- that when it’s over, not much has happened. (Seaman apparently likes the piece, however. He conducted it in a 1995 guest appearance with this orchestra, the only other performance I can recall of the "Reformation" Symphony in the past two decades.) In Tchaikovsky, Seaman’s emotional thermostat seemed to be set several degrees cooler than the composer’s, though the brooding atmosphere of the opening was very effectively rendered.
Mike
Greenberg
