New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s (NJSO) Winter Festival kicked off with a host of audience favorites, from the works presented to the spotlight soloist and what a way to ring in the New Year! The weekend of January 3 through 5 saw the dazzling Inon Barnatan as piano soloist for a program with sweep and heart under the baton of the brilliant Xian Zhang, Music Director and Maestra of the NJSO.
The first piece transported us to mountains of Eastern Europe where we traveled with Bedrich Smetana’s “Ma Vlast” (“The Moldau”). If you have never heard this piece in person, with the way the music swirls through the voices of the orchestra and dynamically, from a kitten’s whisper to the roar of a mighty river, then you have never heard this audience favorite. Even through the final expressions, the sound swirls like the elemental river leaving us sated with a Spring we hope will follow for us soon.
When Barnatan took the stage, playing Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, opus seven, in its NJSO Premiere, I was in the perfect place to watch the magic of his hands! This amazing work, begun when Mrs. Schumann was Ms. Wieck, at the tender age of 14, is a virtuous work in the hands of a true master. The lush beauty, detail and romantic quality, destined to inspire the later impressionists, such as Claude Debussy, is wrought in full musical color with Barnatan’s signature verve. The Romanze was brooding, deliberate, and full, and when the Finale arrived, every bit of his skill made fireworks and lightning, with passion, in the pas de deux with orchestra and Jonathan Spitz, principal cello of NJSO flexing the beauty of the piece with Xian and Inon. The audience wanted one more taste before letting them go, and we got an encore of the Frédéric Chopin Cello Sonata with heartstrings vibrating in time.
What else to do for Act II than Sergei Prokofiev’s Selections from “Romeo and Juliet.” The orchestral suite is arranged a bit differently than the play, but the familiar martial mien of “The Montagues and the Capulets” gives way to the evocative gamine beauty of “Juliet as a Young Girl,” through the joy of “Minuet” and “Masks,” to the angst and pathos of “Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb,” through the dramatic “Death of Tybalt,” where every clash is nearly visible with the music. The pre-concert lecture featured James Musto, Acting Principal Percussionist for NJSO, and he explained the importance of what we were hearing, how selection of something as basic as a mallet can sculpt the sound for a particular piece and a particular venue—so much greatness in a single afternoon.
There’s still time to catch more Winter Festival, “In The Spotlight”– get your tickets now for the very best seats at www.njsymphony.org.