Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto, New York
…an incredibly sensitive player with a beautiful tone, a rich technique and a modest offstage personality that belies his onstage strength…realized the music’s full exhilarating beauty.
Music Review: Brooklyn Heights Orchestra With Dan Franklin Smith at B’klyn College
BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — There is no end to the flowing stream of talent in this town. Suppose you are a professional in a non-musical activity and you are also gifted in music and want to perform publicly? How do you keep classical music going? If you are in the vicinity of Brooklyn, you may want to try out for the Brooklyn Heights Orchestra, a group of high-quality volunteer players led by Maestro Nicholas Armstrong. That way, not only do you get the heady experience of playing in a symphony ensemble sprinkled with lots of chamber music on a regular basis, you also get the thrill of performing with fine guest soloists such as pianist Dan Franklin Smith, as the BHO did last Thursday evening, May 24th, at Walt Whitman Hall, Brooklyn College.
They played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #3 in C minor; Op. 37 with a special devotion to the manuscript. Of all the great composers, Beethoven was perhaps the most obsessed with detailed instructions on how his music should be played for all eternity. It requires careful study not to overlook his every minute marking. Dan Franklin Smith and Conductor Nick Armstrong did that and more. They realized the music’s full, exhilarating beauty.
Dan Franklin Smith is an incredibly sensitive player with a beautiful tone, a rich technique and a modest offstage personality that belies his onstage strength. The pianist was dealing with a Steinway that was just slightly out in the upper register, but this did not impede his performance. In fact, the situation gave us an old-fashioned, 18th century pianoforte sound but with plenty of modem piano brightness. No matter how exciting the outer movements are, one can always tell a successful Beethoven player by the slow movement, in this case the Largo. The piano starts it alone and Smith’s interpretation was extremely effective: warm, gracious and solemn all at once.
For an extra treat, we had an encore from Smith of a Beethoven Bagatelle, Op. 33, C major. As he explained before playing it, the Bagatelles show Beethoven at play; short pieces displaying his precociousness and humorous side.
The orchestra began the concert with a hair-raising and rhythmically driven reading of Gioachino Rossini’s familiar William Tell Overture and ended with an equally unfamiliar but fascinating work: Zoltan Kodaly’s Variations on a Hungarian Theme (“Peacock”).
The Kodaly work, written c. l939 is a series of 17 variations without a break. Much like a sequence of exotic movie scenes, each variation transfixes the listener and then moves smoothly along to the next. One of the nicest started with a piccolo solo joined by the flute, a birdlike duet setting off a cacophony from the entire orchestra much like a dawn serenade in the country. The work reminded this listener of an oriental version of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City. (1941).
Kodaly devoted much of his life to advocating his theory of early music education. It begins with study of folk music in one’s native surroundings (Hungary, in his case) and expands to development of music skills so that children are able to sing write down melodies and improvise at will. This in turn, he wrote, develops the mind and creates a musical culture full of concert-goers who love music. Music-making with a human touch, that is, such as that of the Brooklyn Heights Orchestra. The price is right and what’s needed is a larger future audience to experience it. Try it!
—Rita Hamilton, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto, New York