Orchestra Opens Season The Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra launches a new season with thrilling classical works
by Carol Simmons
The Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra launched its 2008-09 season in living "colour."
With Music Director Neal Gittleman back on the Schuster Center podium for his 14th year in Dayton, the orchestra opened the program with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," a piece written by French composer Paul Dukas in the late 19th century and made a pop cultural icon by Walt Disney in the 1940 animated film "Fantasia."
The familiar work has a whimsical narrative quality -- perhaps made more pronounced by the mental image of Mickey Mouse in the title role. Full of orchestral colors -- or "colours," as the DPO's 2008-09 theme is spelled -- the piece's harmonic mood moves from the mellifluous to the malevolent in subtle measures.
The orchestra's recent performance emphasized both extremes, thoroughly capturing the work's almost gleeful sense of drama and suspense.
The piece's pop-cultural ties made it a fitting choice to open the orchestra's season, which is filled with events that feature classical and orchestral music found in nontraditional contexts. A Disney animated classic is downright canonical next to such upcoming nonsubscription series programs as "Barbie at the Symphony" and "Play! A Video Game Symphony."
The concert, however, remained more true to custom, following the opening piece with a piano concerto and, after intermission, Brahms' first symphony.
The concerto, which Gittleman described as likely being "your favorite piano concerto you've never heard," is rarely performed. The only piano concerto composed by the turn-of-the-20th-century German-born pianist Mortiz Moszkowski, the work shares some coloristic and dramatic elements with Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," which was written at about the same time.
The concerto, however, is more grandiose, with each movement achieving its own range of moods and structural planks of introduction, development and conclusion. At times evoking the brightly cascading qualities of French Impressionism, the piece also featured lush Romantic passages that would feel at home in a Rachmaninoff composition.
Bringing the work to life was guest pianist Richard Dowling, who traversed the piece's multiple moods and textures with equitable facility.
The evening concluded with Brahms' first symphony, often referred to as "Beethoven's 10th," not only for its points of reference/ homage, but also for its movement forward.
Structural integrity is at the core of Brahms' oeuvre, yet the musical master's sense of form serves a higher calling than mere construction. Heart and soul emerge in transcendent ways when his work is played with sympathy and insight -- as it was that night.
By the time the orchestra reached the work's concluding measures, they had taken us through nothing short of a transformational experience.
If this is the quality we get in the first concert after the summer hiatus, then we're in for a spectacular year.
