It doesn’t always bode well when a conductor prefaces his orchestra’s opening selection with an explanation. But before the Madison Symphony Orchestra launched into contemporary composer Aaron Jay Kernis’s 2005 composition “Newly Drawn Sky” at its Nov. 8 concert, Maestro John DeMain did just that.
Kernis, a Pulitzer Prize winner who teaches composition at the Yale School of Music, drew his inspiration from a visit to the ocean shore at nightfall, DeMain explained. “Let your imagination wonder just what is going on in the sky,” he added. As it turns out, the explanation proved wise for an audience filling just half of Overture Hall. The post-modernist composer painted a soundscape that was sometimes dark and brooding, and at other times lyrical and longing, an interpretive emotional canvas composers have long imagined but rarely realized with this depth and breadth.
At 17 minutes, the Kernis composition unexpectedly delighted the audience and set the stage for an evening of emotional highs. As a program, however, the evening lacked a thematic thread as DeMain’s musical time machine took us back from the 21st to the 19th century.
The anticipated highlight was guest pianist Joyce Yang performing Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra in C Major, Op. 26. It was Yang’s first visit to MSO, and judging from the response it won’t be her last.
Born in South Korea, Yang began learning piano from an aunt at age 4, and apparently has never looked back. At age 19, she won the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition silver medal and has been burning up the keyboards ever since. Count her performance of Prokofiev with MSO as another triumph.
Sweeping onto the stage in a long reddish gown, Yang anchored herself to the piano bench for a 28-minute musical whirlwind. Her virtuoso technique was flawless, and her facial expressions matched the mood of the passages she played. Her energy and reach were such that at times it seemed she might literally cascade from the piano bench or run out of keyboard. When she reached the composition’s blistering closing coda, audience members couldn’t leap from their seats fast enough in a standing ovation.
In response, she treated the house to an encore of George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love,” a performance full of flourish and color. It’s unfortunate she couldn’t have inserted more Gershwin into the program.
The evening closed with Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61. The orchestra presented an accomplished version of the classically structured work — but these performers rarely misfire — written in 1845, a time when the composer’s mental health began deteriorating. The music’s energy seemed colored with almost imperceptible shades melancholy as the 38-minute composition wove its way through four movements.
After the lyricism of Kernis and the passion of Prokofiev, the Schumann piece might have seemed out of step with the evening overall. But that didn’t stop the orchestra from excelling in its always-reliable way.
The symphony repeats the program Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 10 at 2:30 p.m.
