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Beethoven Dreams - Magnificent Virtuosity

A thrilling display of confident virtuosity was the hallmark of last weekend’s Santa Barbara Symphony concerts at the Granada Theatre. Conductor Nir Kabaretti was back on the podium between stints at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm – his manner and energy bespeaking a burgeoning international career. In the concertmaster chair, a weekend cameo appearance by world famous violinist Gilles Apap, whose diverse musical personality and brilliant mind has garnered him a wide following of faithful acolytes around the globe. He led the high strings of the orchestra with every fiber of his body and most of the neurons in his brain. His personality contagious, the entire orchestra glowed with pride of purpose.

Pianist Inna Faliks, who calls Los Angeles her nest between solo and concerto gigs all over the place, was guest artist for maestro Kabaretti’s intriguing program of Beethoven and Beethoven-inspired music. Somehow, she also manages her day job as professor and head of Piano Studies at UCLA. Turns out, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 is one of Faliks’ favorite concerti, and she performed it on Saturday night with intimate detail and personal insight.

The concert’s opening salvo and intellectual pivot point on which the entire program depends for meaning, Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff’s 2020 masterpiece, The Eternal Stranger, A Monodrama for Actor and Orchestra, (based on a dream of Beethoven), was easily one of the most elegant of several collaborative partnerships between the Symphony and Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre Company over the past several years.

Receiving its west coast premiere last weekend, ETC’s Artistic Director Jonathan Fox has ingested whole, Joshua Sobel’s powerful text about alienation, which Milch-Sheriff uses as metaphor for Beethoven’s increasing deafness during the two years (1805-1806) he was composing the other two works on the program. Spinning original visual and declamatory magic by crafting Sobel’s monodrama into two vivid narratives rather than one as initially conceived by the composer, Fox has engineered a brilliant “musical” affect through the two characters and their diverse vocal inflections and physical actions.

Fox places narrator and immigrant on either side of the narrow passageway in front of the orchestra on stage, their very separation aiding the now more distinct story line. Perplexing eternal dichotomies: good/bad, right/wrong, yin/yang, are made clearer through Fox’s directorial choreography. Kudos, Jonathan Fox, for making words physically apparent.

John P. Connolly, in his 52nd year as a Los Angeles-based actor for stage, television and film, was a riveting narrator of Sobel’s gut-wrenching text. Staying well to his side of the perilous argument taking place physically on stage until the very last moments of the mini-drama - Connolly’s superb declamations, his labored movements, visually akin to the stress of Atlas supporting the world, made for magnificent mini-theatre.

Los Angeles-based Indian American actor Nitya Vidyasagar has spent most of her career in TV and film. Her theater credits include ETC’s recent production of Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul. Diminutive in stature, her character clinging to one last piece of cultural identity (a drum), Vidyasagar as immigrant, represents choreographically, a visual goddess of elegant resolve.

Thanks to Jonathan Fox’s inspired stage direction, Vidyasagar rose over time literally, from her opening movements of low, even groveling disorientation to the powerful standing choreography Fox devised for her increasingly self-aware triumph over prejudice. Kabaretti and the orchestra navigated the often troubling and murky waters of Milch-Sheriff’s magnificently complicated score, with the uncanny ease of professional musicians who know what they’re doing. Video projections onscreen behind the orchestra were at once pertinent and visually helpful to understanding the undercurrents of Milch- Sheriff’s profound and ultimately beautiful score.

As per Milch-Sheriff’s instructions to segue the last notes of her piece into the next work, Kabaretti selected the unusually constructed Piano Concerto No. 4, for last weekend’s morph. The transition from 21st century to 19th was accomplished successfully with discreet lighting, pianist Inna Faliks entering the semi-darkened stage quietly to play the delicate solo piano figure that opens the concerto, as narrator and immigrant left upstage behind the orchestra. The effect worked beautifully and not without a few shivers. Stunning.

With years of study and many performances of the Piano Concerto No. 4 under her belt professionally, Faliks has crafted a signature interpretation of the work. Her confident playing, bold and articulate, is also a puff pastry of tapered phrasing and delicate rubati. Faliks demurs discreetly at cadential points and enjoys with delight, the fun of harmonic crunches, especially the sneaky ones. Her cadenzas Saturday night, particularly at the end of the first movement, were a pleasure to hear, as the artist contemplated then dissected, the art of nuance.

Kabaretti and the orchestra topped the evening with a magnificent performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, it’s four movements whisking by with breezy élan and not a little bravura playing. Beethoven was always complaining his music was not being played fast enough, and the maestro apparently agrees, keeping the pace razor sharp, feather light, and, well, bouncy. Fantastic!

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review