Vail – Marin Alsop had to walk in some big footsteps when she took her turn last weekend as the main guest conductor for the New York Philharmonic’s annual residency at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.
The Colorado Symphony’s conductor laureate followed Lorin Maazel, the philharmonic’s veteran music director, who took the podium for two of its four visits to Vail, and David Robertson, who joined the orchestra for three memorable concerts in 2004.
Robertson, who took over in 2005-06 as the St. Louis Symphony’s music director, has become something of a sensation. He is mentioned as a candidate for virtually every major conducting post that opens, including the Chicago Symphony’s current music director vacancy.
Local audiences are well aware of the fine performances that Alsop drew from the Colorado Symphony during her 12 years at its artistic helm. The question has been whether she could achieve the same success with higher-profile and potentially more temperamental ensembles.
The answer, if last weekend was any indication, is yes. Alsop put a discernible interpretative imprint on the three very different, if largely conventional, programs. She brought substance, energy and focus to each and appeared to establish a solid rapport with the musicians.
High points included a viscerally kinetic performance Sunday evening of John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra),” with its throbbing cascades of layered sound. This defining work of the late 20th century is already an orchestral mainstay.
Saturday evening, Alsop and the orchestra captured the extraordinary emotional range of Dmitri Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, from the brash, often biting opening to the moving third movement with its choralelike sublimity.
Whether Alsop can routinely turn in the kind of transformative interpretations expected of conductors such as Simon Rattle remains open to question. But it is clear that she continues to improve, and since conductors don’t reach their prime until later in life, the 49-year-old still has plenty of time.
It is also clear that the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater, with its less-than-desirable, open-air acoustics and accompanying ambient noises, is not the kind of setting that would allow any orchestra, no matter how good, to produce peak performances.
Besides Alsop’s strong conducting, the three concerts all featured first-rate solo appearances, starting Friday evening with up-and-comer Jonathan Biss’ nuanced playing in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58.
Sunday evening, Jean-Yves Thibaudet brought the right doses of spunk and spiritedness to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, capturing the jazzy, café-concert feel of this kind of French version of “Rhapsody in Blue.”
But the unquestioned standout among the three soloists was Leila Josefowicz, who Saturday evening delivered a gripping, authoritative interpretation of Sergei Prokofiev’s opaque Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 19.
The 28-year-old attacked this work with an intense, all-out performance. She met its every test, from the daredevil runs in the manic second movement to the constantly changing timbres that were scratchy, even screechy at times, but never beautiful in a conventional, romantic sense.
In keeping with turnouts from previous years, last weekend’s concerts drew capacity or near-capacity audiences each evening – a total of 6,504 people – and it’s not hard to understand why.
The involving, high-quality performances by Alsop and the orchestra again demonstrated that the philharmonic’s annual residency remains a centerpiece of the summer classical-music season in Colorado.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
