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Oasis
of spirit
Jackiw "wows" audience
Sunday, June 4, 2006
Steven Romano Mento
Cape May Music Festival. Bay-Atlantic Symphony, Jed Gaylin (conductor), Steven Jackiw (violin). "Brahms and Bohemia." Dvorák: Czech Suite; Brahms: Hungarian Dances nos. 1, 3, 10, and Violin Concerto in D, op. 77. Convention Hall, Cape May.
The concerts of the Bay-Atlantic Symphony at Convention Hall in Cape May are a sort of oasis of fresh olympian spirit and bold artistic expression amidst what is normally a seaside reserved for fun, fantasy, and frivolity. The leadership of conductor Jed Gaylin over the years has challenged and changed the former 'Bridgeton Symphony,' now the Bay-Atlantic, into an increasingly multi-faceted and shimmering gem.
Their second concert at the Festival this season was entitled, "Brahms and Bohemia" in acknowledgement of the gypsy influence on both Brahms and Dvorak.
The Czech Suite of Antonin Dvorák began in low registers and dark timbers leading to pastoral feeling suggesting open meadows and fields. The next section gave more robust expression adorned with trills and dance-like gestures alternating with folk melody. The crisp articulation was beautifully accented over perfect phrasings and liquid tempo movement. The third movement features a musical "question" posed by the woodwinds that is "answered" by the strings. Variations thereof define the rest of the movement in a well paced serving of immediacy that could have been a routine and matter-of-fact experience with a lesser conductor. The 6/8 dance to follow ushered in softly pulsing winds under the strings that sounded their voices of longing that were then taken up by french horn, then flutes, clarinets, and oboes.
In the final movement a short motif takes on a particularly Bohemian life of frolic and adventure - here confronting danger, there rebounding with triumph and joy. The conquest became a "double entendre," extending from the music itself to this inspired performance.
Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances opened with charm in a tempo more heartfelt than hurried and given just enough *accelerandi and really exquisite *allargandi to poise the varying moods as little revelations.
The *Allegretto that followed seemed to sit down a little at the very beginning, but quickly achieved its "lift" a few measures later. The quirky *Presto provided a wild and riotous conclusion to the first half of the concert.
Not to be outdone by the first half, the collaboration of Jed Gaylin with the Bay-Atlantic and the extraordinary gifts of violinist Stefan Jackiw felt like the gift of a Maslowian "plateau experience" or cognitive bliss in the presentation of Brahms' great violin concerto. The start - unfocused in the low strings - evokes a mist clearing before a titan. Gaylin picked up the entrances like a poet reciting his verses, only to be confronted by the solo violin which Brahms has designated as Prometheus.
Standing in for Prometheus was Steven Jackiw, who took the fire and ran with it. The Bay-Atlantic players were able and willing accomplices. This was an evening of playing "in the moment," but not as a good student taking sound
advice from the muse of music (like pianist Claudio Arrau), but as one who is intoxicated by the muse and follows him home.Jackiw had internalized the short musical figures, and his playing extended their meanings as flashes of insight, with nuances eminating from the disappeared sound of the long notes, poised on all corners of harmonic change. This was far from "lovely violin playing" overwrought with personal indulgence and sentimentality. The expressive messages were carried in an acute sense of line tempered by an understanding of structure, restrained only by the focused minutia of poetic meaning and the demands of Brahms' vision that is characterized by lofty grandeur.
This evening Jackiw had tamed two wild stallions simultaneously: virtuosity and high art. And the audience responded with long applause and cheers.
****
The next two Bay-Atlantic concerts are Sunday June 11 at 5 p.m. featuring pianist Shai Wosner playing Mozart, and Sunday June 18 at 5 p.m. featuring violinist Hillary Hahn in her first performance of the Karl Goldmark Violin Concerto.
For more information call the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts at 609-884-5404 or 800-275-4278.