Five months since including Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1996 Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, the Philharmonic gave its first-ever performance of her Fairytale Poem. Composed for a 1971 children’s radio program, the alluring piece is based on a modern fairy tale, The Little Piece of Chalk, by the Czech writer Miloš Mazourek. An allegory of creative perseverance, the main character is a tiny piece of chalk that dreams of depicting castles and imaginative places but is limited to scribbling dull words, numbers and figures on a classroom blackboard until the day when a boy takes it away and uses it to draw castles, birds and flowers on the pavement. So happy to have its wish fulfilled, the chalk fails to notice its own disintegration in creating this fantasy world.
Imaginatively scored for a small orchestra of flutes, clarinets, percussion, harp, piano and strings, the 15-minute piece opens mysteriously as fluttering woodwinds and strings float upward and then dissolve. A repetitious rising-falling pattern suggesting the chalk’s yearning to escape from the boring blackboard figures is strongly reinforced by twittering woodwinds over a long series of heavy thuds on the piano. Rising to an exuberant and colorful climax, the sometimes dissonant music ultimately dissolves into silence. Payare approached the piece affectionately, creating an atmosphere of mystery and magic, with the ensemble’s strings in remarkably good form – crisp, incisive and tonally diverse.
Philharmonic Principal Anthony McGill was the stylish soloist in Mozart’s irrepressibly joyful Clarinet Concerto, the last major piece he completed by the composer. The clarinetist’s articulation, polished phrasing and smooth shifts in register were immediately impressive. While the livelier Allegro outer movements were cleanly articulated and uncommonly agile, his interpretation was its finest in the sublime central Adagio, where his pianissimo playing movingly conveyed its inherent intensity at a perfectly judged tempo. Under Payare’s baton, the orchestra was equally refined and elegant. McGill added a nimble-footed rendition of Jasmine Barnes’s jazzy arrangement of the spiritual, ‘Amazing Grace’.
Finally a less than thoroughly engaging account of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony. Despite some excellent playing, this interpretationof the harrowing work came off as insufficiently bold and red-blooded. While there were some moments to admire – the burnished woodwinds in the opening moments, especially the bassoon’s presentation of the initial theme; the neatly articulated playing in the Scherzo and the playful rendering of the march tune; and the heartbreaking lower strings and bassoons in the Finale – taken as a whole, it failed to pack the requisite emotional punch.
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