Auspicious opening to the CPO season with violinist Gil Shaham

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It was good to welcome the Calgary Philharmonic back for their new season of concerts, a point emphasized by Marc Stevens, the CPO’s president and CEO, in his series of opening remarks. This is a transitional year for the CPO. After two terms as conductor, Rune Bergmann was given a grand sendoff in June as he moved to the next phase of his career. At present, the CPO is without a permanent conductor and is going through the process of selecting a new permanent conductor.

To assist in this process, the orchestra has engaged Karen Kamensek to act as principal guest conductor and advise the orchestra as it makes its decision about what is best going forward. Kamensek herself has recently appeared as a guest conductor in two fine concerts and gives every impression of being a steady hand on the tiller in this time of transition.

The selling point of the opening concert, which sold very well, was a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Gil Shaham as soloist. In a world filled with many fine violinists, Shaham has managed to find his own niche. This niche is not so different from that of Canada’s James Ehnes, heard with the orchestra last year. Rather than blazing fireworks and voluminous sound, Shaham draws his audiences into his own intimate, poetic sound world. He has a technique that seems to make the technique disappear. Instead, it is the lyrical passages that stand out, as well as his precision in tuning in one of the most difficult aspects of playing the violin. The audience just ate it up.

Each movement of the concerto was applauded (contrary to concert convention), the broad symphonic vision of the first movement followed by an emotionally interior account of the slow movement, and with the friskiest of rondo finales to conclude. One could hardly find a finer performer of this concerto. Diffident without being coy, Shaham drew from the concerto every ounce of its musical qualities, his encore, the Rondo en gavotte from the Third Unaccompanied Suite of Bach, to be admired as much as the main performance.

Kamensek led the CPO in an engaged fashion in the Beethoven concerto and, by herself, led the CPO in a brisk account of Smetana’s popular The Moldau to open the evening. But the best was yet to come. New to many members of the audience was the series of interludes Richard Strauss extracted from his opera Intermezzo, in much the same fashion as his more familiar suites from Der Rosenkavalier. This music, in much the same vein, is no less attractive, filled with buoyant Straussian waltzes and beautiful quiet moments. The slow movement contains some of Strauss’s best music of this kind. The orchestra warmed to the brilliantly written music, and led by Kamansek, they produced a finely crafted performance, all the more impressive in that the music must have been new to many of them. Pianist Rolf Bertsch deserves special mention in his performance of a piano part that is deceptively difficult, as does concertmaster Diano Cohen.

There cannot be more juice in the selection of Slavonic Dances by Dvorak than was found in the energized, colourful performances presented as the closing item of the concert. There is a certain kind of rhythm that needs to be captured in Dvorak’s Czech-style furiants to make them really work. This pointed sense of rhythm and energized playing by the orchestra were the hallmarks of this fine performance. Items from both sets of dances were included, the more complex dances from the second set as beautifully delivered as the more popular items from the first set that framed them.

This is a generous way to open the season: a full-featured program, a superb soloist, an equally fine conductor, and an orchestra happy to be back in the saddle and to ride the musical range once more. This was an auspicious opening to the season, one that includes pianist Lang Lang in two weeks. Calgarians have much to look forward to with their own CPO in this year of transition. With the orchestra playing at a very high level, one can only hope for a good choice for a new leader for the band, after all, it is one of the best in the land.

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