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ASO Goes Lite Classics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
For several weeks running, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has gone to extremes, programming sublime or riotous music, the kind that requires as much technical brilliance as deep philosophy — a Bach passion, a Stravinsky ballet and the like.
This week, the orchestra scaled it way down, offering what some years ago would have been called light classics or, in the days before Sinatra and Bing Crosby, pop music.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, a boyish looking, hair-sprayed blond conductor made his local debut. Under 40, Arild Remmereit is young by conducting standards. Not quite a rising star, he’s held jobs with smaller ensembles in Europe and guest conducted some fine ensembles on several of the known continents.
He opened the evening with music from his native Norway: Edvard Grieg’s familiar “Peer Gynt.” Remmereit freshened it up a bit by reshuffling the numbers and thus divorcing the drama inherent in the music from the plot of Ibsen’s play, for which it was originally conceived.
As a Norwegian leading us through what’s effectively Norway’s national music, Remmereit gets a free pass from us, although the logic of his 40-minute sequence never materialized. Nor did he stir the ASO to help make a compelling case. Good music stands on its own, whether heavy or light, but only when the performers make it so.
As in Borodin’s super-pops “Polovtsian Dances,” which closed the evening, the playing was clean but blah — loudish, hazy and lacking character.
Conductor and orchestra were more alert and musically sympathetic for the most hummable of Mozart’s great violin concertos, the A Major Concerto No. 5, with ASO concertmaster Cecylia Arzewski was soloist.
Although she paints within a gilded romantic frame — generous long bows, full vibrato, rounded phrasing — Arzewski is not a heart-on-sleeve artist. Just right for Mozart, her temperament is classical, finding truth and beauty in proportion over exuberance, eloquence over hedonism.
She turned lines in the adagio with understated care. But she also dashed off the zesty finale with more gusto than we typically hear from her, taking risks, finding connections, making sense of it all.
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