By The Los Angeles Philharmonic is off to a good start.
Playing to a packed house, the L.A. Phil received a standing ovation after stunning its audience with skillful and heartfelt performances of “Pavane pour une infante defunte” by Maurice Ravel, Camille Saint-Saens’ piano concerto No. 2 and the evocative and exotic symphony of “Scheherazade” by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Thursday night, Nov. 16, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Ravel’s opening piece was performed by a small group, consisting mainly of string instruments, with little variation in and dynamics or tone. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant, soft and melodious performance to whet the appetite of concertgoers eager to hear more.
The orchestra then shifted to Saint-Saens’ concerto, which has vastly different from the preceding piece. It fluctuated quickly from major to minor keys with great variation in dynamics, with the astounding performance of pianist Andre Watts. It seemed the concert hall wasn’t large enough contain the lovely sound streaming from it.
Watts stunned the audience with his seemingly flawless solos, often playing the soft, melodious motif with one hand and beginning the dissonant, minor motif in the other.
Watts’ emphatic pounding of the keys impressed the audience so much that at the end of the performance there was a unanimous standing ovation recognizing his talent.
The orchestra then expanded to include more wind and brass instruments to accommodate Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” the symphony aptly named after the woman in the children’s fable, “The Thousand and One Nights.”
The tale from which the symphony got its name tells the story of the Sultan Shahriar who, after being betrayed by his most trustworthy wife, deems all women to be faithless and orders that one concubine be brought to him each night and killed the next morning.
The Sultana Scheherazade, wanting to live, creates a plan that will spare her life for one thousand and one nights, telling the sultan a story each night and saving the ending for the following evening.
In his autobiography, Rimsky-Korsakov says that he chose the name of each movement (The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, the Story of the Kalender Prince, the Young Prince and Princess and Festival at Baghdad: The Sea; Shipwreck) as a guide for listeners when listening to the piece.
By not restraining the meaning of his music to the strict confines of program music, Rimsky-Korsakov does exactly what he intended. He allows listeners to experience the music in a unique way, only giving them a slight nudge while directing them to a far-off and exotic land.
The piece included leitmotifs, a theme that reoccurs throughout, one of which represented the Sultana Scheherazade and the sultan through a solo violin and string instruments with brass, respectively.
The L.A. Phil played these themes perfectly, with violinist Martin Chalifour skillfully maintaining the long, high notes intended to be Scheherazade and ending the piece with Scheherazade at the end of the last movement.
The L.A. Phil’s passion and emotion was, as always, present in its performance and contagiously spread to the enraptured audience.
