By David Williams
For The Saturday Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- One doesn't have to look far to find connections among the composers Berlioz, Wagner, and Mahler, featured in the concert performed by the West Virginia Symphony Friday night at the Clay Center.
Each was a revolutionary in his approach to composition and orchestration.
Berlioz and Wagner were contemporaries. Berlioz made his mark first, and Wagner made part of his career by ruminating through and recasting motivic and orchestration advances that Berlioz started. Mahler, one of the great conductors of Wagner's music dramas, found similar inspiration in Wagner's music.
The conductor Grant Cooper led an exhilarating performance of Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique." The piece remains one of the true masterpieces of romanticism, with its joyous subversion of classical form and its forward-looking motivic integration and development as well as its story about a young artist's obsession with a young woman.
Cooper's interpretation made all the motivic connections while letting the ardor of the music cascade out.
The winds, brass and percussion shone in the exuberant "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath." The strings made richly textured layers of tone in the middle movement, and the English horn and oboe solos were faultless.
By David Williams
For The Saturday Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- One doesn't have to look far to find connections among the composers Berlioz, Wagner, and Mahler, featured in the concert performed by the West Virginia Symphony Friday night at the Clay Center.
Each was a revolutionary in his approach to composition and orchestration.
Berlioz and Wagner were contemporaries. Berlioz made his mark first, and Wagner made part of his career by ruminating through and recasting motivic and orchestration advances that Berlioz started. Mahler, one of the great conductors of Wagner's music dramas, found similar inspiration in Wagner's music.
The conductor Grant Cooper led an exhilarating performance of Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique." The piece remains one of the true masterpieces of romanticism, with its joyous subversion of classical form and its forward-looking motivic integration and development as well as its story about a young artist's obsession with a young woman.
Cooper's interpretation made all the motivic connections while letting the ardor of the music cascade out.
The winds, brass and percussion shone in the exuberant "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath." The strings made richly textured layers of tone in the middle movement, and the English horn and oboe solos were faultless.
The second movement waltz had sparkling playing from strings, horns, winds and harps.
The opening "Dreams and Passions" glowed in tone and hurtled along rhythmically.
Wagner's Prelude to "Tristan and Isolde" featured well-colored woodwind lines and willowy tone from the violas and cellos.
The singer Audrey Babcock took a while to settle into the first of Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer." She slid into the top notes of leaps in her upper range. But she made a shimmering tone in the second song, apt for its text of morning and flowers.
The churning third song had some of her best singing, furious emotion and rich, dark sound.
The highlight was the beautiful desolate finale.
Cooper and the orchestra made vibrant the myriad details of the accompaniment. It is a big orchestra sitting there, but Mahler typically uses just a few instruments at a time. Cooper's conducting made picture-perfect connections and the players, like the flutes and harp of the finale, sounded fine.
The concert repeats at 8 p.m. today at the Clay Center.
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