Review | Despite glitches, Promusica concert enjoyable

By For The Columbus Dispatch  • 

ProMusica Chamber Orchestra’s 2012-2013 season opened Sunday night at the Southern Theatre with an enjoyable program full of musical journeys, memories and epitaphs.

Music director Timothy Russell announced lightheartedly from the stage that, for his remaining concerts with the orchestra, he has chosen to conduct only pieces that he likes. Despite his enjoyment of last night’s program, the orchestra suffered a few rough spots in their performance.

The opening work, Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, seemed hesitant. While elegant, it lacked coherence, especially in the woodwind section. Dotted rhythms and small figur-

ations were inconsistent among the musicians, and the first two movements lacked a foundation of impulsion. The third movement, Menuet, was much stronger, maintaining the elegance while exuding passion, but the final movement again lacked a unified stylistic approach.

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring turned back to its roots in the original setting for 13 instruments. The smaller ensemble exposed even more of the piece’s intimacy, and Cop-

land’s lean, simple style emerged in a much purer character than in the larger orchestral version.

Ancient Airs and Dances #1, from Italian composer Otto Respighi, was one highlight of last night’s program. Here, the musicians united in a style full of class, combining the straightforwardness of ancient melodies with 20th-century charm. The balance between strings and winds was accurate, articulation was clear and dynamic shifts were graceful. Between the glittering harpsichord, shining winds and sweeping strings, Respighi’s work was thoroughly enjoyable.

Last night also marked the world premiere of ProMusica’s 58th commissioned work, Clarice Assad’s Album de Retratos (Family Portraits). Assad wrote this duo guitar concerto for her father and uncle, Sergio and Odair Assad, to commemorate the lives of her forebears and their journeys across the world and in music.

The concerto is full of fragments of deeply personal memory — sounds, colors, moods — and is fairly programmatic, as could be expected from a work based on family photographs and stories. The orchestra was not nearly as nimble as the Assad brothers in predicting nuances of tempo, but overall they remained coordinated among Ms. Assad’s journey of memory.

For much of the piece, the guitars seemed like an afterthought rather than the feature. One reason could have been the terribly managed amplification that threw the brothers out of balance and muddied their near-perfect precision.

Fortunately, the brothers returned for an encore that demonstrated their renowned virtuosity. They play with a deep intuition of each other’s playing, and they led the audience on a journey to music not commonly heard in a classical concert.