Every year, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra must decide how to end its season. The general drill here is that “a high note” is a good thing: it encourages patrons to exit with happy faces and to return in the fall. As a rule, some blockbusters are saved for last. But there are only so many blockbusters, and the past couple of months have contained performances of Verdi’s Requiem and Holst’s The Planets. For this season, Calgary Phil offered a concert that, to borrow a line from the musical Chicago, was intended to “giv’em the old razzle dazzle.”
And dazzle it did. On hand was conductor laureate Hans Graf to guide the evening’s proceedings, again showing why he is a conductor the orchestra loves to play for. And then there was newcomer Kate Liu, a young American pianist and laureate of the International Chopin Competition a few years ago. She performed Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto in F minor, a work that audiences always love, and here it was performed with dazzling brilliance.
Liu is a tremendously efficient performer. Nothing appears difficult, whether it is filigree passagework (with which this concerto abounds), rhetorical gestures, infectious dance rhythms or sheer power. Slight of build, Liu is able to get a full-throttle sound from the piano; she also excels in tonal levels that grade between medium soft, softer and still softer. All these elements serve this concerto well. An experienced Chopinist, she had the full measure of the work, from the bold opening movement to the speech-like phrases of the middle, and the dance-infused charm of the finale. The audience tremendously enjoyed this performance, which displayed pearls of pianism, lyricism and bravura.
In response to the vociferous, prolonged applause, Liu offered Johann Strauss Jr.’s Voices of Spring as an encore in a sparkling piano transcription, saturated with the sentiment of “alt Wien,” filled with spot-on octaves, super-fast scales, and tongue-in-cheek fun. Liu yields to no one in her ability to beguile an audience with her gentle manner, but she can get a wonderfully big sound from the instrument without forcing. Much razzle-dazzle here.
Former Calgary Phil music director Hans Graf returned to the Jack Singer for a rarely performed note-for-note production of Felix Mendelssohn’s score to Shakespeare’s timeless play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Courtesy, Calgary Phil
The headline work was the complete music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn, with the familiar overture composed when Mendelssohn was only 17. Later, he added music for the dialogue, including the well-known scherzo and the universally known Wedding March. This was a reprise of a performance by Graf many years ago. As before, Maureen Thomas was the versatile actress who performed all the roles during the portion of the play that has the incidental music proper. And, as before, she was completely convincing in the various parts and delivered the text clearly and with great verbal imagination. Thomas’s performance was its own form of razzle-dazzle, a dazzling display of dramatic virtuosity in which a dozen different characters from the play are portrayed.
The set pieces, including the Nocturne, were played as well as one could want. Graf leads by a form of consensus, clear in expectation of what he wants, but alive to those small nuances that happen in the moment. Having a superconducting technique always helps, especially for those who happen to be performing. For the audience, there is the added measure of comfort with the orchestra playing just that little more in tune and just that little more rhythmically settled. When an orchestra feels secure with a conductor, they simply play better. Suitable lighting accompanied the performance, which saw the orchestra grouped to the side so that Thomas had space to move.
A different way to conclude the season, perhaps, but no less convincing than on other occasions. Charm and grace have their own way of speaking, and there was plenty to go around to conclude a fine season of music-making by Calgary’s own professional orchestra, a point of deserved civic pride.