Abstract
The final concert of the Sarasota Music Festival rode a heat wave with a couple more sizzling performances before shutting down and sending faculty and students back to their hometown practice rooms.
Saturday night’s performance got off to a slow start with a lukewarm Cello Concerto No. 9 in B-flat major, G 482 by Luigi Boccherini. The accomplished faculty soloist Ronald Leonard and the student orchestra with faculty violinist Theodore Arm as concertmaster and Dante Anzolini conducting, lacked a sense of unity. Challenges in pitch and ensemble hindered the grace and bubbling joy that one might seek from Boccherini’s music.
The audience spent the intermission buzzing about the next work on the program, Yehudi Wyner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto (Chiavi in mano) performed by Festival Artistic Director Robert Levin. Immediately engaging and inventive with such variety of tonal colors, one can see what this composition has been so well received. The piano and orchestra remain in constant dialogue creating melodic fragments and the rare extended line with colors that evoke both the late Romantic excess and the refracted expression of modernists from Stravinsky to Messiaen. Tonality seemed to be treated somewhat differently, almost casually in a typical American or jazzy way. Thus it is not surprising that thoughts of George Gershwin kept coming to mind. Wyner has a unique and valuable sonic world and he shares it with a sense of humble humor. -- Gayle Williams