Bruce Hodges watches the performance of Martinů, Bartók and Saint-Saëns at Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall on 11 October 2024
What a joy to hear a relative rarity, Martinů’s Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra, written for violist Jascha Veissi in 1952, and apparently for years one of the most-performed concertos for the instrument of the 20th century. On this occasion the star soloist was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal violist Choong-Jin Chang.
From the opening notes, his instrumental tone was immense – flooding out as if in a big, spacious sphere. Part of the credit should go to the great contemporary luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz, who built the instrument in 2016.
The piece is more contemplative than virtuosic, though Chang’s expertise in the florid passages gave him more than a few show-stopping moments. Apart from his tonal beauty, other highlights included a beautiful pairing with the orchestra’s oboe in the first movement and, near the end, an unusual sequence with the snare drum. The prolonged ovation was well deserved.
Conductor Roderick Cox opened the afternoon with the suite from Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin – 20 minutes of biting, metallic fury – which coincidentally gave the violas another moment as they plunged into the opening pages’ guttural lines. Even more striking were the precisely executed clacking col legno strokes in the strings.
To close came Saint-Saëns’s ‘Organ’ Symphony, a showpiece for the titular soloist, in this case the superb Raphael Attila Vogl. But the composer breathes life into all of the strings, blessed with extraordinarily long phrases, and the ovations at the end told the rest of the story.
BRUCE HODGES
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