Ksenija Sidorova, accordion soloist, and guest conductor Carlos Kalmar, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (credit: Raftermen)

ASO excels in an engaging musical mix with Kalmar, Sidorova

CONCERT REVIEW:
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
February 3 & 5, 2022
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, GA

Carlos Kalmar, conductor; Ksenija Sidorova, accordion.
Jessie MONTGOMERY: Records from a Vanishing City
Astor PIAZZOLLA; Aconcagua
Franz SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 8, “Unfinished”
Josef STRAUSS: Music of the Spheres/span>

Mark Gresham | 10 FEB 2022

This past week’s program by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra was an exciting combination of new and old music. The more recently composed pieces inhabited the program’s first half while the more traditional fare followed intermission. For this review, we attended Saturday’s performance.

The program opened with Records from a Vanishing City by Jessie Montgomery, a tone poem completed in 2016, based on her recollections of the musical environment she experienced growing up on Manhattan’s creatively vibrant Lower East Side in the last two decades of the 20th century.

The performance the ASO, led by guest conductor Carlos Kalmar and managed well the work’s mélange of textures and overlapping styles from avant-garde jazz to diverse world music, bringing Montgomery’s complex musical cityscape to life, holding the ear’s attention.


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The charismatic Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova joined Kalmar and the ASO as soloist Astor Piazzolla’s Bandoneón Concerto (“Aconcagua”), composed in 1979.

Although they are related, the bandoneón and the accordion are not the same. Both are bellows-driven free-reed aerophones held between the hands, but the similarities pretty much end there. Bandoneóns have a different sound from accordions due to their design and the manner of playing.

Ksenija Sidorova performs Astor Piazzolla's Bandoneón Concerto, with conductor Carlos Kalmar and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  (“Aconcagua”) (credit: Raftermen)

Ksenija Sidorova performs Astor Piazzolla’s Bandoneón Concerto, with conductor Carlos Kalmar and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. (“Aconcagua”) (credit: Raftermen)

Nevertheless, “Aconcagua” makes a splendid concerto for the bandoneón’s cousin, the accordion. Sidorova makes the most of that with her compelling performance, which ran the emotional gamut from boldly high-spirited to melancholic pathos and captured the essence of Piazzolla’s bandoneón style.

Sidorova returned to the stage to perform Sergey Voitenko’s Revelation as an encore. It’s a piece which, she says on her Facebook page, brings up in her “a vast variety of emotions, nostalgia, warmth, love, pain, despair… much like tango does, too! I find it easy to draw parallels with Astor Piazzolla’s music…”


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I fully expected this to be the unrivaled pinnacle of the concert. Yet Kalmar and the ASO scaled even more musical heights after intermission with a truly inspired performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8.

Unfortunately, at the end of the work, it was becoming clear that a patron in the audience incurred a medical emergency.

ASO front-of-house staff were the first to respond, and uniformed EMS technicians arrived quickly on the scene. As they were departing with the patron, someone in the audience shouted, “Thank you, first responders!” which elicited an approving applause from the audience and stage alike. Word from the ASO is that the patron who had the medical emergency is okay.


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The “Sphärenklänge“ Waltzer, Op. 235 (“Music of the Spheres“), which then closed the concert, is considered one of the most exemplary efforts of Josef Strauss, the melancholic younger brother of Johann Jr., known fondly as “Pepi” to his family and close friends. Even his older brother once said of him: “Pepi is the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular…” He was a composer who might have developed a more profound musical language had he not been part of the Strauss family dynasty that dominated the Viennese world of “light music” for decades. Still, he chose to follow the family tradition.

The “Sphärenklänge“ Waltzer displays a mastery of form and colorful orchestration, with an almost Wagnerian dreamy introduction of subtle, suggestive harmonies. The principal theme is not particularly attention-getting, but the piece has a sense of grace and playfulness; it is a rather sophisticated waltz that still has much appeal, even if not an instant hit like the older brother’s best. 


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Mark Gresham

Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.