In what has become a summer tradition, the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey began its annual week-long summer music festival with a concert that featured extraordinary young musicians. The event, on Sunday evening at The College of St. Elizabeth in Madison, featured two winners of the 2013 Pearl and Julius Young Music Competition.
In addition to monetary awards, winners receive the opportunity to perform as soloists with the orchestra. This year, the winners were pianist Constance Kaita and violinist Soyeong Park.
Park, a high school sophomore, played the Ciacona by Baroque composer Tomaso Vitali, originally transcribed for orchestra and organ by Respighi and further transcribed to eliminate the organ by Maestro Robert Butts.
As transcribed, the piece is beautiful and passionate. The fact that it does, in fact, sound more Romantic than Baroque, has led critics to question the authenticity of its attribution to the otherwise-obscure Baroque composer. Nevertheless, it is a popular piece for violinists thanks to its bravura passages and emotional impact. Park’s performance shows a depth hard to fathom in a high school student, but her prodigious accomplishments date back to her early childhood and it was a privilege to hear her perform this lovely work.
There can be no question as to the provenance of the piece played by the other young soloist, college student Constance Lin Kaita. She played the first movement, allegro con brio, of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #3. One of the first compositions of Beethoven’s most productive period, the concerto is somewhat daunting to play because it is so familiar to the audience.
Kaita was not intimidated. In fact, the audience may have been intimidated by the sight of the slender and fragile-appearing soloist jumping headlong into the power of Beethoven’s creation. Her energy and emotional impact matched her technical brilliance as she brought the earth-shaking music to life.
What can we look forward to when this astonishing generation of young prodigies grows to its full potential?
The rest of the program was interesting and full of surprises, as BONJ concerts often are. The orchestra’s lead bassoonist, Andrew Pecota, performed the full three movements of the Concerto for Bassoon composed for him by Butts.
Butts’ composition sends the bassoon on a solo journey against, or perhaps more accurately, above the melodic flow of the strings. Those who anticipate jarring, unpleasant sounds when they hear “modern” or recently-composed music are not going to experience any of that in Butts’ work. Its modernism is in the occasionally-unexpected timing, or the melodic line that goes somewhere unanticipated. Pecota is a marvelous ambassador for his instrument. We had the pleasure of hearing him talk about it informally and that was almost as much fun as hearing him play.
Following the intermission, a trio of soloists appeared. The Monticelli Trio consists of three virtuoso cellists who have decided to play together: Suji Kim, Min Kyung Lee and Gjilberta Gelaj. They performed a rarely-heard and relatively short piece with the orchestra: Requiem by David Popper. A Czech-German cellist and composer whose lifetime and work straddled the late Romantic and early Modern periods, Popper in this work seems to fall more on the Romantic side of the divide. Butts remarked that there is no explanation for why it is called Requiem. May we speculate that it may have been composed in memory of Popper’s young son, who died of tuberculosis? Just a guess.
The concert ended on a delightful note, with Franz Josef Haydn’s Symphony #101, “The Clock.” Familiar to many in the audience, the symphony is upbeat and cheerful, a good way to close a concert.
The rest of the week has much to anticipate. Friday, Aug. 9, will offer an evening of chamber music at Grace Church in Madison, featuring Mozart, Schubert and Renaissance music presented in period instruments. Also at Grace Church on Saturday, Oscar Wilde pays a visit to the western U.S. in a new musical by Butts and Jewel Seehaus-Fisher. And next Sunday afternoon, the orchestra will be back at The College of St. Elizabeth with a concert version of Verdi’s Otello.