January 20 & 21, 2024
Peace Center Concert Hall
Greenville, South Carolina – USA
Janna Hymes, conductor; Joshua Roman, cello.
Adam SCHOENBERG: Bounce
Camille SAINT-SAËNS: Cello Concerto No. 1
Maurice RAVEL: Ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Suite”)
Paul HINDEMITH: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber
Paul Hyde | 24 JAN 2024
This season’s guest conductors of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra have brought a bracing measure of surprise and risk to the Peace Center Concert Hall in Greenville, South Carolina.
A sharp line divides the orchestra’s 76th season from the past.
Following the towering final performances (Mahler’s Second Symphony) in April 2022 by conductor Edvard Tchivzhel, who led the ensemble for almost a quarter of a century, the orchestra embarked last fall on a season of guest conductors, all vying for the title of music director.
The six young conductors have brought with them music never heard before on the Peace Center stage, particularly works by women and minority composers and more contemporary works than ever before.
Tchivzhel, a Soviet defector much loved by the Greenville audience, focused on the core 19th-century classics. The music director candidates have shaken things up.
Janna Hymes
(credit: Chris Bucher)
Not that the guest conductors have forsaken the classics. They’ve simply expanded the orchestra’s palette.
Janna Hymes, the most recent guest conductor, actually took a rather traditionalist approach, spotlighting works by Camille Saint-Saens, Maurice Ravel and Paul Hindemith on Jan. 20-21.
Yet there were unexpected touches as well. The January 21 program opened with American composer Adam Schoenberg’s Bounce.
Originally intended as a ballet for children, Bounce is an appealing and colorful work, highly rhythmic, often polyrhythmic, and easy to listen to in the manner of film music. With its shifting rhythms and fragmented melodic line, it suggested minimalist influences.
‘Hallelujah’
Another eye-opening surprise was sparked by the guest soloist for the evening, cellist Joshua Roman. Following a fine performance of Saint-Saens’ Cello Concerto No. 1, Roman offered an encore — and what an encore it was. Rather than dazzling the audience with his technique, which he had already accomplished in the concerto, Roman sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” while accompanying himself with chords and riffs on his cello.
Joshua Roman
(joshuaroman.com)
Roman crooned some verses and passionately declaimed others, finally leading the audience in a serene singalong of the final measures.
It was an unexpected, moving and certainly unforgettable moment in the concert hall, a coup de theatre that, no surprise, elicited a standing ovation. It seemed a perfect addition to a season dedicated to stretching boundaries. Earlier in the season, for instance, Greenville audiences were treated to such innovative pieces as Migrations in Rhythm: A Concerto for Beatbox and Rhyme, composed in 2022 by Evan Meier and Christylez Bacon. Still to follow this season will be the first performance in Greenville of Wynton Marsalis’ 2015 Violin Concerto and Astor Piazzolla’s Concerto for Bandoneon. In Greenville, this is fairly heady stuff.
Dynamic performance
On the January 21 program, Roman offered a confident, incisive performance of the Saint-Saens concerto. He played the lyrical episodes of the second and third movements with heartfelt sensitivity and negotiated the lighting fast passages in the third movement with casual virtuosity, his fingers leaping across the fingerboard. I particularly admired the chiseled clarity of his playing and his deft handling of the tricky passages involving harmonics. Hymes drew polished playing from the orchestra.
Hymes, currently artistic director of the Sedona Symphony, followed that with a colorful and suave account of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. Particularly memorable were the vivacious “Empress of the Pagodas” section of the piece, which bristled with energy, and the warmth and burnished beauty of the final movement, “The Enchanted Garden.”
The program concluded with Hindemith’s splendid Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. Hymes provided a dynamic reading of this four-movement orchestral showpiece. She brought out the best in the musicians. Among the many fine solos, timpanist Daniel Kirkpatrick was a standout. The brass shone forth magnificently in the first and fourth movements, the latter providing a rousing conclusion.
Hymes is clearly a conductor with a strong command of the orchestral repertoire and a sure vision of what she wants to achieve. With Hymes’ recent performances, Greenville concert-goers have enjoyed four music director candidates so far this season; two more remain.
A new music director will be chosen by April. It’s an exciting time for classical music fans in Greenville. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Greenville Symphony Orchestra: greenvillesymphony.org
- Janna Hymes: jannahymes.com
- Joshua Roman: joshuaroman.com
Read more by Paul Hyde.
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