Jennifer Koh
REVIEW: A sublime, adventurous program shows the ASO at its best
By Jordan Owen
From Glass to Rachmaninoff to a new work inspired by a traditional Korean folktale, the evening demonstrated the importance of diverse programming.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra convened Thursday, April 9, for a program that…saw the world premiere of Nicky Sohn’s A Tale of the Bunny and the Turtle alongside Philip Glass’ Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 in D Minor. All three were sublime…
The performance of Glass’ Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra featured guest violinist Jennifer Koh. Of the three works on hand, it was the one that I was most curious to see the ASO tackle. Glass is a wildly mixed bag and an acquired taste even among his most ardent fans (myself included). At his best, those endlessly cyclical walls of arpeggios form a lush, hypnotic backdrop for the ambient surrealism of Koyaanisqatsi, the maudlin late middle-age angst of The Hours and the reactionary mania of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. At his worst … well, there’s the Philip Glass knock-knock joke: “Knock knock! Who’s there? Knock knock! Who’s there? Knock knock! Who’s there? Knock knock …”
That divisive nature makes Glass a hard sell for a lot of established orchestras. Smaller chamber ensembles love his work (the Kronos Quartet’s recordings through the years are a prime example), and solo pianists have devoured his oeuvre, but full orchestras — which thrive on the multilayered complexity of classical composition — haven’t always shared that enthusiasm. As such, the Glass concerto felt like the evening’s make-or-break moment.
To my pleasant surprise, the whole concerto came together nicely. Koh (whose hot-pink hair continued the evening’s trend of bold fashion choices) understood that the real efficacy of a large-scale Glass composition hinges on the featured instrumentalist’s willingness to embellish the dynamism of the phrases at hand. The melody lines in Concerto No. 1 are sparse and seldom more than arpeggios or overtone sequences that serve to accentuate the underlying chord structure. The real emotion comes in the give-and-take with which such phrases are played, and Koh was keenly aware of that process. The same cycle of notes, though played ad nauseam, has a narrative quality all its own when the player leans in and out of intensity in their delivery.
Koh’s ability to capture that core essence of the large-scale Glass work seemed to carry across the orchestra as a whole. The ASO was more than willing to commit to the bit, and it was refreshing to see the old guard of the Atlanta classical scene leaning into the sort of avant-garde realms that are normally the province of hipster music students.