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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
It’s been an especially high-profile week for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, in new personnel, new construction projects and, not least, in performing excellent concerts.
We’re funny that way. Across the country, the classical-music community speaks of its own demise in the bleakest terms, with books and blogs dedicated to the End Times of the art form. (One prominent opinionator, Greg Sandow, for example, maintains a vigil on artsjournal.com/sandow.)
But Atlanta’s homegrown orchestral and operatic scene came late to the party — just a few decades of professionalism — and perhaps that’s given us the advantage (or the blinders) of relative newness. For us, there was no golden age against which the present pales; what’s best about the Atlanta scene is what’s happening right now.
It happened this week, with the ASO hiring a top programming consultant to boost the quality of on-stage talent. It happened yesterday, with news that the ASO is building a major revenue-generating performance pavilion in the northern suburbs.
And it happened Thursday night in Symphony Hall, when ASO principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles led a Haydn symphony and a healthy hour of excerpts from Richard Strauss’ opera “Der Rosenkavalier,” with a trio of superb singers and a stage soaked in atmospheric red lighting, including a big silver rose projected on the back wall. (It was sung in German, with an English translation projected on screens above the stage.)
The excerpts covered the key moments of the opera, starting with the great noise of the overture — of coital whoops and moans — and through the glorious trio and the opera’s concluding notes of regretful optimistism. Themes of fickle love, class divisions, lost youth, adolescent crushes, wistful maturity, the shifting perspective of time and the sorrows of relationships were all addressed in intoxicating, full-throated song. (Still, it helped if you already knew the complete opera.)
Runnicles let the orchestra soar — in prismatic color and tonal heft — although with all the vocal power at the front of the stage, he rarely covered the singers. The effect, quite properly, was to let the orchestra sing as a character itself, providing running commentary and psychological elaborations on what the others were saying.
And also like the best concert opera, the singers acted to the hilt (while dressed in normal formal attire). Soprano Twyla Robinson sang the Marshallin, the aristocrat who stops the palace clocks to ward off aging. Her bearing was regal, her tone velvety as she carefully unfolded her every phrase. When she sang “Time is a strange thing” you really felt in the middle of the drama, so rounded was her characterization.
Mezzo Elizabeth Bishop offered fewer insights into her role, playing the Marshallin’s boisterous adolescent lover, Count Octavian. Bishop’s centered tone, especially for her higher notes, was shiny with a darkened tint, like a new copper penny.
The understated star of the evening was Lyubov Petrova who sang the young girl Sophie with a jewel of a voice — of diamond-cut facets and seemingly indestructable brilliance. We’ll be hearing more of the Russian-born soprano: she’ll sing the star-crossed lover in Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” next week at the Atlanta Opera.
The evening began with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48 in C Major — nicknamed “Maria Theresia” for the empress of Austria in whose court “Rosenkavalier” might have taken place. The symphony features prominent French horn parts, rare for Haydn and another link with Strauss, who, famously, wrote exquisitely for the instrument.
Runnicles and the ASO gave the symphony a loving and warmly indulgent reading — where Haydn isn’t so much a classical-era wit as a father to the moody romantics.
Note that this program will be repeated just once more: Saturday at 8 p.m. Grab a ticket while you can.
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