The Peabody Symphony Orchestra launched the Peabody Conservatory's 2005-2006 season on Saturday, Oct. 1 to a sold-out house in the Friedberg Concert Hall. Under the director Hajime Teri Murai, the program featured pianist Eric Zuber, co-first-prize winner of the 2005 Yale Gordon Concerto Competition.
To begin, the PSO presented the stimulating Overture to "Fidelio" by Ludwig van Beethoven. Zuber then dazzled the audience with the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D, Op. 30, by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Zuber is a locally-grown talent, raised in Baltimore and a graduate of both Peabody's preparatory and conservatory divisions. He shares the 2005 first prize in the Yale Gordon Concerto Competition with pianist Benjamin Kim. After graduating in 2005, he left Baltimore to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Leon Fleisher.
Notorious for its technical difficulty, Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto is feared by many well-trained professional pianists. Zuber's performance, however, went well beyond the merely technical demands of the piece, an expressive delivery full of obvious personal enjoyment. Clearly, the Peabody community can look forward to watching his developing professional career with great pleasure. It is, however, an unfortunately difficult trait of the arrangement that some of the solo's most impressive technical passages are overpowered by melodies from stronger instruments.
Following intermission, the PSO presented Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D, Op. 47. Arguably Shostakovich's most famous orchestral work, the 5th Symphony is exhausting in terms of its emotional strain on performers and engaged listeners.
While the program overwhelmingly featured 20th century Russian works, it was not stylistically stilted, and rather used to its advantage the typical Russian intensity present in both Rachmaninoff's and Shostakovich's works while contrasting the very different styles of the two composers. Certainly, the differences abound: Rachmaninoff preceded Shostakovich by more than a quarter century, and he left Russia following the revolution, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. Shostakovich, on the other hand, remained in the USSR even through the political oppression of the Stalin era. The 5th Symphony is sometimes seen, in fact, as an attempt by Shostakovich at redemption in the eyes of the Soviet government. After Stalin's renunciation of his operatic adaptation of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich produced works, among them his 5th, that seemed to reflect a glory appropriate for a country in which the communist revolution had purportedly triumphed.
Yet, difficulties arise in the interpretation of the Shostakovich 5th Symphony. Certainly, a crowd-pleaser, it is popular for its loud, invigorating orchestral exuberance. But the fascinating and inscrutable nature of Shostakovich is such that public and private life masks and the true inner existence always come into question. Interpretations of the 5th Symphony therefore sometimes are developed with an intense self-consciousness, and with the weight of the hidden individual behind the fa5fade.
For the most part, the PSO's performance appropriately toed the line between pain and euphoria. Yet, in the last movement, the orchestra broke free and seemed joyful, with its soaring brass and the seemingly glittering rays of light portrayed through repeated high-pitched eighth-notes in the strings. While it is a matter of taste, in the end, the individual struggles alone despite the public face painted on to impress external authority
The Peabody Institute's students continue the school's tradition of high musical achievement, and some of the finest selections of the Western concert music tradition will be presented in the coming season. The excitement with which the PSO's first concert was greeted indicates that there will be much to look forward to at Peabody in the coming year.
