Guest soloist Zuill Bailey.
For this month’s program, the Madison Symphony Orchestra brings us not only a guest soloist but also a guest conductor.
Tania Miller is an established conductor in Canada and is winning a wider reputations beyond. She brings with her, if not in person, at least musically, another figure from Canada. This is the German-born Michael Oesterle. His four-movement symphony, New World, was completed in 2014 under the auspices of the Victoria (B.C.) Symphony and first performed by it under maestra Miller.
For Madison, she offers not the complete work, but its final movement, Home.
The entire symphony reflects the composer’s experiences as an immigrant coming to terms with his new life in Canada. Obviously, many references or passages have meaning for Oesterle, but not, alas, for anyone else. Oesterle is a skilled composer, and he writes very knowingly for orchestra, creating a lot of lovely sounds from one moment to the next, but the piece is devoid of general shape or uniting threads.
As a part of this percussion-happy generation, he constantly uses of all the bangables one might think of, to little substantive effect. Miller obviously gives the piece her all, and the orchestra copes bravely.
The guest soloist is American cellist Zuill Bailey, who performs the Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, by Edward Elgar. This was Elgar's last important composition before his death and it has become recognized as the last great cello concerto in the literature. It is cast in an unconventional form of four movements, rather than the usual three, and is rich in both lyrical and virtuosic elements. Bailey has a sweet tone and precise technique, which serve him well in the two middle movements. The flanking ones, however, deserve more bold, assertive and soaring tone than he gives it. Still, it is a work he obviously loves.
For an encore he gives a fragment of the Dance of the Sylphes by Berlioz.
The second half of the concert features Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. For so very familiar a work, Miller obviously strains to put her own stamp on it, but she provides some fascinating individual touches in inflections and flexible tempos. But she is a conductor who throws herself into the music, as her dramatic gestures and body language show. This is, in sum, a big and brassy fulfillment of the composer’s intentions, given a first-class rendition by the orchestra, and quite wowing the audience.
The program will repeat Saturday evening, Oct. 20 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 21 at 2:30 p.m. at Overture Hall.
