by Alex Serena
Staff Writer
It was a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s concert last month.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic played host to an evening filled with great music and inspiration. Miguel Harth-Bedoya, associate conductor of the Philharmonic, led the orchestra in three distinct pieces.
The first piece was by composer John Harbison. His Piece, “The Most Often Used Chords,” is based on the elementary tones.
The sound from this mini-symphony was not as smooth as the other two numbers that followed. “Chords” felt like it was almost too much orchestra and that this music was meant to be played by an orchestra of a smaller size.
It did, however, delight the audience with the variation of the notes and scales that were played.
Joseph Schwantner’s “Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra” was the second piece of the night. It featured percussion soloist Evelyn Glennie.
The first movement, “Con Forza,” starts out with Glennie pounding rhythms on drums and marimba, with the sound eventually evolving into unity with the rest of the ensemble.
The relationship between the two goes into the second movement “Misterioso” with a concerto solo that showed off Glennie’s talent as a percussionist. During the movement she moved between two sets of percussion instruments that were set up in the back and front of the stage.
The lights suddenly dimmed and it was just Glennie and the instruments that were visible, much to the joy of the audience. She gave them a very spirited solo that featured a wide range of instruments from a pair of bongos to a water gong.
What makes her performances remarkable is that Glennie has been deaf since she was 11 years old. Throughout the music, she relied on the vibration as a cue to keep her in sync with the music.
The final movement was “Ritmico con brio,” Which started out as an improvised solo showcasing Glennie as the backbone of the music. The concerto ended with a high-energy finale cadenza that pleased the audience enough so that a standing ovation was given to all the performers.
The conductor, Harth-Bedoya and Glennie came out a total of six times to thank the crowd.
The high tempo concerto was an interesting lead in to Antonín Dvorák’s “Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op.70.” This dark symphony was inspired by Dvorák’s witnessing of a train of anti-Hapsburg nationalists disembarking at a Prague train station. This work became a personal statement of the Czech character. The whole symphony is for the Czech patriotism that Dvorák admired. It was a very slow but intentional piece that kept building up until the finale where it ended with an energized, threatening tone. The dark D minor tone finally turned into D major, giving the audience some peace in the end.
A standing ovation ended the concert with conductor Harth-Bedoya and the orchestra bowing to the audience.
