South Florida Classical Review

Gerard Schwarz led the Palm Beach Symphony in Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony Tuesday night in West Palm Beach.

An Alpine Symphony is one of Richard Strauss’ least-performed tone poems, and it’s not hard to see why.

The 50-plus-minute work requires a huge ensemble that includes eight horns, two tubas, an organ, a wind machine and a supersized oboe called a heckelphone. And like Saint-Saëns’ grandiose Organ Symphony, it’s sometimes dismissed as pompous over-orchestrated kitsch (“not an achievement that will add luster to the composer’s reputation,” sniffed the New York Times after a 1916 performance.)

But the piece brims with stirring passages that would appeal to anyone who loves Strauss’s music, and the Palm Beach Symphony gave a vivid, thrilling  performance Tuesday night at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

The stage was packed with musicians from end to end, from huge string sections to a corps of percussionists and brass players. Conductor Gerard Schwarz managed the large forces with skill, drawing out the power of the brass brigade without letting it dominate the rest of the orchestra.

It’s usually bad news when a projection screen appears over an orchestra, since most of us already spend enough time in front of screens. But in this case, the screen was used only to helpfully identify which of the work’s 22 sections (Sunrise, At the Summit etc.) was being played.

Although there was the occasional ragged entrance, brass hiccup and string intonation issue, the orchestra performed with skill and polish, creating an evocative scene of an ascent to a remote mountain summit.

In the opening Night section, the lower brass played with dark force, soft, balanced and exerting understated power in a passage that was full of mystery. Schwarz led the orchestra through a long crescendo to Sunrise, one of the work’s great passages, where strings sounded unusually rich and full in radiant passages that portrayed the arrival of daytime.

Throughout the performance, the projected titles made the continuous music easier to follow, making it possible in the Waterfall section, to hear cascading water in the rapid wind playing. There was stark and dramatic trumpet playing in the Glacier scene. And the section called At the Summit came off with majestic grandeur, with strings, winds and brass each taking on the melody for a gripping portrayal of the arrival at the peak.

As the aforementioned 1916 assessment noted, in a viewpoint that hasn’t changed much with time, “the ending is intolerably long drawn out.” But there is still a lot of great music in it.

Winds played with glowing tones in the section describing the setting sun and then with dark foreboding in the Calm Before the Storm, which sounded more menacing than calm. The storm arrived with violent force, with a percussionist cranking away at the wind machine. The concluding return of night brought the return of the magnificent lower brass playing, grim, rich and full bodied in its portrayal of the return of darkness.

Alisa Weilerstein performed Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 with the Palm Beach Symphony Tuesday night. Photo: Evelyn Freja

In the first half of the concert, the American cellist Alisa Weilerstein came on stage to perform Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Like many of his works, it had an almost bipolar feel, manic one moment and somber the next.

Weilerstein played with assertive bite in the sardonic opening motif, and then played with a steady insistence throughout the hard-driving movement. Ascending to the upper reaches of her instrument, she played with a fast vibrato and emphatic bowing that elevated the intensity of a movement that already felt pretty high-energy.

In the second movement, the orchestra opened with rich chords of darkly dissonant harmonies that were pure Shostakovich. Weilerstein, whose playing in the first movement was all strain and intensity, unleashed her warmest cello tone, playing with a rich vibrato in this sad, pensive music.

In many concertos, with some honorable exceptions, the cadenza is an artistic low point, a virtuoso half-time show that’s bookended by the real music. But in this concerto, where the composer dignified the cadenza with the designation as its own movement, the solo episode for cello was an integral part of the concerto. 

After a meditative opening, Weilerstein broke into passionate chords that filled the hall, played a melody on one string with an accompaniment on the other with expressiveness and skill, and ended with impossibly fast passages that built up into the climactic return of the orchestra for the brief, aggressive finale. 

As an encore, she played the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4, drawing out the chords for a few minutes of serenity and repose after the frenetic notes of the Shostakovich.

The concert opened with Gateways by the American composer Daniel Asia. Written for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the work reflects the city’s historic role on the Ohio River as gateway to the northern and southern regions of the United States.

Bright and brassy, the work had the optimistic tone that suffused a lot of mid-20th century American music. The most effective aspect of the brief work was its propulsive beat, with the clanking brass and insistent rhythms evoking busy commerce, shipping and industry.

The Palm Beach Symphony’s next concert will be 7:30 p.m. March 2. The program includes Paul Moravec’s Miami Variations and Lullaby, as well as Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 and the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 with soloist Vadim Repin. palmbeachsymphony.org

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