Pianist Awadagin Pratt, Scheherazade make an impression with CMF Orchestra
By Peter Alexander July 26 at 12:15 a.m.
The Colorado Music Festival orchestra presented an intriguing program last night (July 25), combining a new piece for piano and strings, played by a striking individual soloist, and a dramatic reading of Rimsky-Korsakov’s colorful tone poem, Scheherazade.
The soloist, Awadagin Pratt, has earned a reputation as committed musician who devotes himself fully to the programs he plays. The piece that formed the focus of his performance with the orchestra and conductor Peter Oundjian was Rounds by Jessie Montgomery, one of the leading young American composers today.
Rounds was part of the Still Point project, in which six composers including Montgomery were commissioned to write a new piece to be inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Pratt was one of the performers in the project, along with the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the self-conducted orchestra A Far Cry. The six works were released on an album titled Still Point, taken from the poem: “At the still point of the turning world. . . . there is only the dance.”
The album was released by New Amsterdam Records in 2023. Pratt has played Rounds with several different orchestras since then, including the Colorado Symphony, which was one of the co-commissioners.
Rounds opens with a rushing figure that, in different forms, recurs in-between and after other episodes. In about 15 minutes, the music carries the listener into different places and moods, from the rapidly pulsing opening to moments of stillness, to moments of great force.
This is clearly a piece that Pratt enters with great enthusiasm.His playing embraced wispy chords and thundering outbursts, and he navigated the partly-written cadenza that allows improvisation with confidence. All the sudden contrasts emerged clearly and cleanly in a riveting performance that evoked an enthusiastic response. After several curtain calls, Pratt came back for a gently touching encore by French composer Françoise Couperin.
The concert had opened with a performance by Pratt, Oundjian and the CMF strings of J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in A major, S1055. In spite of Pratt’s tidy technique and expressive playing, the performance was an example of the problems of playing Baroque music on the modern concert grand. The balance was not consistent, with inner voices often lost in the thick sound. Nevertheless, the performers showed an elegant grasp of Baroque phrasing, and the performance was never less than enjoyable.
A masterfully written score, Scheherazade is one of the most popular of orchestral potboilers. I don’t mean to denigrate the work, which contains gems of orchestration and great orchestral effects from beginning to end, but the pot does indeed boil in the best performances.
You might say that it not only boiled, it exploded last night on the Chautauqua stage. The orchestra demonstrated an extreme dynamic range, which really means that the soft passages were wonderfully, lean-forward-to-hear soft. Any orchestra with a brass section can play loud, but not all can play as softly as the Festival Orchestra did without ever losing intonation or fullness of tone. And you will never hear a softer, or cleaner, snare drum solo than accompanying woodwind solos in the third section of the score.
Oundjian clearly knows how to find the drama in a piece that is bursting with it. He also knows when to trust the musicians and let them take the lead, as he did with the robust trombone solos in the second section, and also some of the delicate woodwind solos. All of the soloists played with finesse and an alluring tone, especially the clarinet and flute. Of the winds, the bassoon, oboe, horn and trumpet soloists also shone.
The largest share of solos in Scheherazade goes to the concertmaster, Jonathan Carney from the Baltimore Symphony, who lent a gentle, sweet tone to the portrayal of the heroine, Scheherazade herself. In places, you could imagine you were hearing a violin concerto, which Carney executed eloquently.
Once again the audience stood and cheered. Oundjian made it a point to recognize all of the individual soloists, including the harpist who has much to do.
This attractive program will be repeated at 6:30 p.m. tonight (Friday, July 26) in the Chautauqua Auditorium. Tickets are available from the Chautauqua Box Office.
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