One of the world’s finest bass players, if not the finest bass player alive today, performed an uncommon program at Boettcher Concert Hall on Sunday with the Denver Young Artists Orchestra.
Grammy winner Edgar Meyer, based in Nashville, Tenn., is well-known to concertgoers in Colorado, but they’re more likely to find him in settings that don’t involve an orchestra, such as when he opened the University of Colorado’s Artist Series in a duo performance with mandolin player Chris Thile in September.
Few works for solo bass exist, but Meyer is a multifaceted composer and performer whose many collaborations with a slew of top musicians extend significantly beyond any traditional conception one may have of the seemingly narrow role of a bass player in an orchestra.
So it was a treat to hear Meyer, 48, deliver two concerti back-to-back accompanied by the well-prepared and enthusiastic youth orchestra. Members are ages 8 to 23, and they represent about 60 Colorado schools.
With music director Scott O’Neil conducting, Meyer’s performed his own Double Bass Concerto No. 1. Infused with fleet-fingered passages reminiscent of fiddle tunes and bluesy undertones, the concerto reveres a fundamentally American spirit. The orchestra is well-integrated throughout the expansive, rhythmically swinging work that offers a kind of narrative on the country’s widespread geography and folksy, improvisatory musical idioms.
Except for a few minor intonation problems, Meyer’s virtuosic reading of Giovanni Bottesini’s rarely-performed Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor also was effortlessly executed. Meyer displayed an obvious fondness for the technically complex, Romantic-era concerto, indulging in his own creative version of the first-movement cadenza.
Overall, Meyer succeeded as he always does to present his instrument as not just a vehicle for rhythm and texture in orchestral works but as a remarkably versatile solo voice.
The evening opened with “after Escher,” Jeff Myers’ bold, if somewhat monotonous, work that won last year’s Award for Orchestral Composition from the young artists orchestra.
The second half of the ambitious program featured the accomplished young musicians in Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis, on themes by Carl Maria von Weber and Bela Bartok’s fun and festive “Dance Suite.”
