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Koh all about beautiful sound
Beethoven’s quirky timpani revealed
Friday, January 5, 2007
By Paul M. Somers

New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, George Manahan (guest conductor), Jennifer Koh (violin). Beethoven: Symphony no. 8 in F major, op. 93; Adams: Shaker Loops; Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op. 35. Heard in Richardson Auditorium, Princeton (also performed at bergenPAC in Englewood, NJPAC, and the Community Theatre in Morristown).

John Adams’ Shaker Loops has become a standard work in that program slot devoted to “modern music.” It was in this instance the choice of George Manahan, a conductor who understands not only how to get a string section through it (an increasing number of conductors can do that), but how to make it come alive for an audience.

It didn’t hurt that many of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra players had residual memories of playing the 1983 revision well over a decade ago with Hugh Wolff. Wolff left the NJSO in 1993.

Manahan took the opening section — one cannot help but think of it as a movement — at a bracing clip. The second, with its double bass and viola humpback whale evocations achieved near stasis. Jonathan Spitz’s cello solo penetrated through the dancing strings above. The fourth movement/section was at first a freight train flying across high desert. Then shifted surrealistically to sleigh bells sounds.

It was good to hear the piece after all these years now played by someone like Manahan who is committed to it, rather than what we often heard when it was new: someone feeling they “ought” to play the latest thing.

The same can be said for Jennifer Koh’s performance of that glorious warhorse, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. She resolutely refuses to place some quirky idea about the piece as her “brand” on the music. She just isn’t that insecure. All she did was produce gorgeous phrase after gorgeous phrase. And when it was time for the finale to fly by, her technique was so secure that her beautiful sound was never put in the background.

The motif of beautiful sound production was continued during the Canzonetta’s many woodwind solos. Bart Feller’s flute solo was particularly worthy of appreciation, as was the passage with *bell-tones in the horn.

There was a smattering of applause after the first movement, and were it not for our “modern” brainwashing to not applaud between movements there would have been far more. But when the finale left everyone gasping in excitement, the response was an instant standing ovation with loud cheers.

The concert began with a very clean and well articulated performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 8. Manahan produced perfect *tempi throughout.

The importance of the timpani as a solo instrument was made very clear as Manahan quite obviously had requested Randall Hicks to allow the rhythmically quirky timp part to come forward. The *Menuetto’s rustic *Trio was enhanced by hornists Lucinda-Lewis and Andrea Menousek. Karl Herman’s clarinet solo left one smiling with pleasure.

So used has Neeme Järvi’s audience become to an encore that its lack with a guest conductor on the podium left the exiting patrons so bereft that it was a subject of conversation.