Martyn Thompson
Cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogio is a rising American star.
Music by three French composers occupied the November program of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, while the rhythm of the waltz was exploited in each of their works.
As a gesture of sympathy after the recent atrocities in Paris, conductor John DeMain opened with the French national anthem. The next work was the Valses nobles et sentimentals by Maurice Ravel. This is distinguished from his later La Valse, which used that dance as a sardonic symbol of European decadence. Originally piano pieces, Ravel used his typical wizardry to transform these short pieces into an orchestral set. They might be called “Eight Ways of Looking at the Waltz,” contrasting joyful with thoughtful moods. Maestro DeMain really dug into the joyful dimensions, but his wonderful woodwind band especially gave the thoughtful ones their magical due.
The soloist was cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio, a rising young American star. Her enterprising choice of vehicle was the first of the two Cello Concertos by Camille Saint-Saëns — a powerfully influential work that gave new definition to the genre, on through Victor Herbert to Antonin Dvorák. The wing sections of its triptych form often display stormy melodrama, but this soloist stressed understatement more than boldness in her approach. Her heart seems most in the gentle middle movement (a waltz, by the way). Still, she was brilliant in the virtuosic display.
For her encore, she broke the waltz spell by playing two tangos she had arranged for herself and string orchestra.
Hector Berlioz, the earliest of the three composers, was a founding father of full-scale Romanticism in music. His five-movement Symphonie Fantastique revolutionized orchestral writing just as Beethoven redefined symphonic writing. It is a landmark in the development of story-telling “program music,” though its pretense of autobiographical implications is rather contrived. But the young French genius, writing only three years after Beethoven’s death, created a score that remains about as sensational as when it was first performed in 1830.
Berlioz’s use of an idée fixe, representing his obsession with the woman with whom he had become enamored (and later did marry) is a real ancestor of the Wagnerian Leitmotif, as used representationally throughout the work.
The dazzling orchestral writing brought out all the riches of the MSO’s playing. DeMain maintained clear and careful balances between layers of writing, benefitting again from the wonderful woodwind playing. All of Berlioz’s effects were finely realized, with one exception: The spicy part that the composer added for high cornet to the second movement (a waltz) was played, and modestly, on a trumpet instead, depriving it of all its zest.
The program is repeated at Overture Hall on Saturday Nov. 21 at 7:00 and Sunday Nov. 22 at 2:30 p.m.