Viola Concerto's Premiere Offers Many Pleasures

One of the main reasons for the large audience, which included a good number of students, was doubtless the world premiere of Ottawa composer and professor Steven Gellman's Viola Concerto.
We don't often have the opportunity to hear violist Jethro Marks as a soloist, so that was the first of several pleasures the concert afforded. Another was the well-prepared orchestral accompaniment conducted by David Currie.

More than anything, though, one could scarcely miss the many felicities of the score itself. Poised and imaginative, it should make a welcome addition to the limited concerto repertoire for the viola.
If neither Marks nor Currie mined the score for all of its potential, they did it basic justice and quite a lot more. Once a performance tradition comes into being for the concerto, it will doubtless sound even more persuasive than it did in Monday's premiere.

One area for improvement would certainly be the tendency of the viola to sound lost amid the uproar of the early part of the finale.

The evening's barn-burner was the Saint-Saëns Symphony no. 3 in C minor, op. 78, also known as the Organ Symphony. The organ is used as an orchestral instrument in the second and fourth movements, but the NAC's Flenthrop instrument isn't quite what's needed here. In particular, it wouldn't be able to supply the deep resonance of the 32-foot stops that are so important to the second movement. James Caswell used an electronic organ to fairly good effect.

Otherwise the performance was a pleasure. There was a nice bloom to the string sound and a fine sense of ensemble all around. The blend and balance of the sections were most impressive too, even if there were a few ragged brass attacks. Above all, Currie kept the music colourful and exciting without trying to make Saint-Saëns' writing sound deeper than it really is.

The program opened with the mid 20th-century Canadian composer Pierre Mercure's Kaeidoscope, a pleasant curtain raiser that is considerably more audience-friendly than the music of most postwar Canadian composers. It is a nice evocation of the ever-changing patterns one sees in looking through a kaleidoscope though, surprisingly, its colouration isn't anything special.

Conductor Currie led an animated account of the intriguing score. -- www.ottawasymphony.com