Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 15, 1994 TAG: 9411150072
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Nitza Kats was the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, of Camille Saint-Saens in Virginia Tech's Burruss Hall Auditorium. After intermission, conductor and music director James Glazebrook led the orchestra through "The Planets" by Gustav Holst.
Nitza Kats is a beautiful and musical pianist. Her Saint- Saens Saturday night was not the picture-perfect rendition you get when you can splice together multiple takes in a recording studio, but it added up to a satisfying whole.
It's a demanding piece that balances yearning, full-blooded Romantic themes with fleeting passages requiring the utmost nimbleness of the soloist. Both structurally and expressively, it qualifies as one of the more unusual Romantic keyboard concertos.
For starters, this piano concerto doesn't even sound like it was written by a Romantic composer - for the first few bars, anyway.
Those hearing it for the first time not infrequently check their programs to make sure they read the composer's name right, because the unusual solo cadenza at the very beginning sounds more like Bach than a late-19th-century Frenchman.
After a thoughtful rendition of the opening cadenza, Kats leapt into the body of the movement with the orchestra with strong, colorful playing. She played confidently, in her most successful moments seeming to chisel phrases out of the air, and ended the movement with the same Bachian musings that began it.
Instead of the expected slow middle movement, Saint-Saens wrote a lively rondo. Possibly the most moving part of this performance was Kats' lovely playing in the gorgeous second melody.
There were a few flubs in the Italian-sounding country dance of the third movement, but Kats brought the work home to a bravura finish. She is not a self-consciously dramatic performer with showy flourishes, but she earned her three curtain calls and several shouts of "Bravo!"
After intermission, James Glazebrook and his players tackled one of the great orchestral warhorses of the 20th century, the suite for large orchestra, "The Planets," by Gustav Holst.
It would be nice occasionally to hear one of Holst's many other masterpieces besides this audience favorite. It also would have been good to have heard the work's final movement, but Saturday night's performance omitted "Neptune the Mystic," most likely because of the difficulty of assembling singers for the wordless women's chorus the movement requires.
Nevertheless, those planets on the itinerary got a respectable fly-by. The dynamic range in "Mars" was huge, from its muttering beginnings to its pounding climax. The inexorable dead march in "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age" was similarly impressive.
The high point, as it usually is in this piece, was "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity," from which Glazebrook milked every ounce of hearty English good spirits. He asked for and got maximum emotion in the noble hymn-like tune in the middle of the movement.
"Venus, the Bringer of Peace" featured lovely solo work from a horn section that sounds much improved this year. There was also beautiful solo playing in this movement by concertmaster Linda Plaut. However, in most of the quiet passages in this and other movements, the house sound system in the cavernous Burruss Hall Auditorium lent a harsh, metallic edge to the string sound.
It felt a little funny to end this piece with "Uranus, the Magician," but Glazebrook and his players got a good round of applause to cap the evening.
by CNB