Zander, Isbin capture crowd
John Zeugner Telegram & Gazette Reviewer
Posted: 2006-10-20 11:28:55
Guitar soloist Sharon Isbin, right, performs with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra at Mechanics Hall on Wednesday.
At the Wednesday night orchestral opening of Music Worcester's 147th season, just before he conducted the Boston Philharmonic in a rousing version of The Star Spangled Banner, Maestro Benjamin Zander announced that "next week I will become an American citizen." That decision, he noted, had been "42 years in coming" (Zander is a native Brit), and Mechanics Hall was "the perfect, perfect" place to celebrate his new chosen country. The capacity crowd exploded with applause. It was a typically canny Zander gesture that put the audience firmly in the palm of his hand.
A few may have slipped out of his grip during the first piece, a rather fussy rendering of Ravel's Rhapsodie Espanol that verged on a "and-then, and-then" presentation of the orchestra's considerable capacities. The Boston Philharmonic is a dynamic mélange of talent — vintage Boston professionals such as Tom Hill (clarinet) and Ronald Kaye (English horn) are paired with relative newcomers like Tyler Shepherd and Joe Ferris fresh out of the BSO bass studios of the legendary Edwin Barker and Todd Seeber. The result, especially when Zander bears down his genius at unpacking complex music, can be sparkling, startling, electrifying, whether it be new tempi for Beethoven or new tension and elation for Mahler. The resulting music-making always commands attention and affection, even when, as in the Ravel, a finished coherence seems absent.
For the second piece Zander brought out an even more celebrated superstar — guitarist Sharon Isbin, who in tuning her acoustic guitar demonstrated just how "perfect, perfect" a place Mechanics Hall is. Isbin's faultless guitar stroking as she made her way through the most famous of all concerti, Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez," permeated everywhere in the hall. And Zander, a man not normally given to the shadows, (he had, for example, rather nastily chastised the pre-concert talk audience for having the audacity to read program notes while Maestro Zander was explicating the music), strove brilliantly to moderate his orchestral accompaniment, letting the magic of Isbin's playing fill the hall. There was an entirely mesmerizing collaboration between soloist and pared-down orchestra, especially in the mournful second movement, which achieved a kind of goose-bump thrill, edge-of-the-seat envelopment. At the conclusion of the third movement, the audience rushed to stand and wildly applaud. Isbin obliged with a rare, before-the-intermission, encore solo guitar piece.
The second half of the concert consisted entirely of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," which Zander in his pre-concert talk labeled "the first psychedelic symphony." Zander frenziedly charged into the first movement of Berlioz's highly programmatic music chronicling the life, love and guillotining of an opium-fried fellow whose mescaline-seared dreams overflow reality. It was an amazing opening, and one that carried over into the second and third movements. The fourth movement march seemed a bit over-deliberate, as if the musicians were squirreling away their energy for the turbo-charged finale. That finale was pure Zander, pouring on explosion after explosion of sound and finishing with arms upright, splayed out in a stunning Y of celebration, frozen against and above the orchestra, as if to say: for citizen Zander the palm is not nearly enough, only a Jacobin full embrace will do.
