March 28, 2024
CONCERT REVIEW

Orchestra puts on vibrant concert Guest soloist Quint performs with gusto

When a work by Dmitri Shostakovich shows up on a concert program, the temptation is to feel dread. It’s long. It’s difficult. It’s weird.

But when the Bangor Symphony Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor Sunday at the Maine Center for the Arts, the temptation was more along the lines of “get up and fight” rather than “sit back and cower.”

Under the direction of Maestro Xiao-Lu Li, the musicians thrust the music forward with its clocking marches and pounding terror. The grinding Soviet patriotism, weighted with doom and domination, rose from the stage with such power that it was impossible to be complacent or stubborn about this piece. Even Shostakovich, who composed the work in Leningrad in 1937, said the 5th was like being beaten with a stick.

More like a log. Fiercely modernist, the piece screams and laughs and robustly reminds us that absolute power is a dangerous thing when it comes to artistic freedom – not to mention political and personal freedom. “You must rejoice! You must rejoice!” is a rough paraphrase of how Shostakovich, late in life, described the forced principles behind the composition.

While Maestro Li suggested beforehand that the audience be patient with the music, the appeal turned out to be unnecessary. The musicians played with focus and cooperative ferocity, pulling and pushing the audience into a work that remains vital and important, if not extremely cogent, these 60 some years later.

It’s fair to say that the Shostakovich was the heavyweight of the afternoon. But no one could call Philippe Quint, the guest soloist, a lightweight in his considerable performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. It helps that he plays a Stradivarius violin with a crystalline voice, and that he finds colors and textures with physical delight.

When scheduling Quint to do the Mendelssohn on the same bill as the Shostakovich, Li surely didn’t miss the poetic coincidence of Quint’s defection from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s to pursue an artistic career. Now Quint is 29 and looks younger. He has a lanky freshness onstage and a habit of looking at the orchestra rather than at the audience. The demeanor reads as shyness, but then the violinist nails the notes like a

rock star, and the combination is entertaining, unpredictable and fun. In fact, toward the end, it seemed as if he might finish the adventuresome last movement a day or so ahead of the rest of us.

Already Quint has been compared to Paganini, the legendary Romantic stylist, both for his dark looks and for his blazing technique. If the Mendelssohn somehow didn’t assure Quint’s place in BSO memory, then his encore – indeed, a Paganini variation – locked it up. It was that left-hand pizzacato, the high pitches and vibrations that pleased the crowd so much that it was up and clapping before Quint finished.

In retrospect, the rendition of Rossini’s Overture to “The Barber of Seville,” which opened the program, seems tucked away. It was a lovely little miniature, but it grows small as the other two offerings of the afternoon continue to grow in size.


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