4/2/22
Friday’s performance at the Ordway Concert Hall marked a new chapter in the ongoing shifting landscape of the pandemic: masks were no longer required, and the venue no longer checks vaccine cards. With capacity capped at 50 percent, around a third of the audience seemed to not be wearing masks. The SPCO still requires masks at venues that are not the Ordway, which happens on Sunday when the performance takes place at Ted Mann Concert Hall.
Stephen Prutsman, an artistic partner with the orchestra from 2004-2007, was commissioned to arrange Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata #1, originally composed for violin and piano, as Sonata for Violin and Orchestra, No. 1, with the orchestra taking on the piano part. Speaking before the world premiere Friday evening, Prutsman said it took over a year to make the arrangement, but that work in no way compared to the genius of Prokofiev himself. He urged audience members to search up the original. “It’s really a glorious work,” he said.
Glorious indeed, and moody. Prokofiev began writing the piece two years after he returned to the Soviet Union after living abroad, in 1938. That was at the time Stalin embarked on his “great purge” where he killed hundreds of thousands of his enemies and sent millions more to forced labor camps. Prokofiev didn’t complete the sonata until after the end of World War II, in 1946. The work holds the weight of those events within it, and ghosts speak through it. Two of the movements were played at Prokofiev’s funeral, after the composer died the same day as Stalin.
Copes, wearing a ribbon with Ukraine’s colors, soars in his playing, and seems almost buoyed by the new arrangement played by his fellow musicians.
The piece begins with the bass players taking on the creeping low notes, which the violin responds to with ominous trills. It continues as a rich tapestry of sounds, with overlapping phrases. The music makes your breath stop with its lilting scales that sound like waves.
The second movement is harsher, as Copes strikes the strings in fury. Then in the third movement the xylophone creates a dreamlike sound. The fourth movement is a fierce dance that surprises in its haunting ending. The scales that were heard in the first movement come back, now sounding as if they are very far away. Prokofiev once called those scales “wind passing through a graveyard.” Indeed they sound like a spirit released from the earthly world.
The second piece on the program is Haydn’s Sinfonia concertante. It’s a chamber piece within a chamber piece, as four soloists perform in contrast with the rest of the orchestra. The work is light, airy, and satisfying. There are lovely moments of harmony amongst the soloists, with oboist Cassie Pilgrim and bassoon player Fei Xie sounding particularly beautiful together. There are also moments of synchronicity, such as a section where Julie Albers on the cello and Copes share the melody.
The concert was a testament to the talent held at the SPCO. Yes, it’s wonderful when audience are treated to guest players from elsewhere, but the SPCO musicians themselves have the capacity to deliver a resounding concert from its core group.
Sheila ReganPioneer PressSPCO breathes life into Beethoven, debuts 'Records from a Vanishing City'
JANUARY 13, 2018
The performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto had similar qualities of joy and elation. The soloist was Steven Copes, who this year celebrates his 20th anniversary as the SPCO’s concertmaster.
Thirty-three musicians accompanied Copes, about half the number typically used in Beethoven’s concerto by a full-sized symphony orchestra. The differences in outcome were stark, and positive.
Rhythms were springier, and a sense of fresh air breathed throughout the orchestra.
In this congenial environment, Copes emerged organically as a soloist of refined sensibility and emotional intelligence. Light of touch and chirruping, his solo lines frequently floated birdlike over the orchestral textures, liberated from the cut and thrust of terrestrial activity.
The Larghetto middle movement was particularly affecting. Phrased with disarming simplicity, it had an ethereality more sensual than philosophical, both in the delicate orchestral accompaniment and in Copes’ gossamer-light, pellucid playing.
The Rondo finale was breezy and full of positivity. This was Beethoven recalibrated — not the glowering Titan that we see in paintings, but a composer capable of fun and frolic, even frivolity. These qualities, along with a life-affirming vitality, brimmed through Copes’ interpretation.
All three pieces in the concert were performed without a conductor. You never for a moment missed one. The SPCO players revel in the individual responsibility they get to make their own expressive decisions.
The results at Friday evening’s concert were collegial and deeply satisfying.
Terry BlainStar Tribune
read moreReview: The Joys of a Conductorless Chamber Performance
October 16, 2016
Election season is an odd time — or is it an oddly appropriate one? — to flood the concert scene with conductorless ensembles. On Saturday the 92nd Street Y opened its season with an inspired performance by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which offered thrilling renditions of music by Mozart, Schubert and George Tsontakis. On Tuesday, a concert by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will include a Haydn symphony. And next week Carnegie Hall hosts the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble that perhaps more than any other has shown how much a player-run group can achieve without the interference of someone gesticulating at them from a podium.
The beauty, joy and freshness of the Saint Paul players’ music-making on Saturday didn’t just breathe life into well-worn standards of the repertory. To me, it was also a reassurance that, in certain quarters, participatory democracy is alive and well.
The concert opened with the New York premiere of “O Mikros, O Megas (‘This Tiny World, This Enormous World’)” by Mr. Tsontakis, who has a fruitful history of collaborating with the orchestra. A retrospective wistfulness clings to its four movements, whether in the Old World elegance of the opening, “Footprints,” which seemed to invite dancing in swooshing skirts, or the Coplandian fiddle strains of “Orbiting (Heart and Soul).”
Scored for strings only, “O Mikros, O Megas” provided an introduction to the refined sound of the musicians. In the subtle gradations from robust dense tone to smoky layers, their playing often resembled that of a first-rate string quartet.
That quality was magnified in the performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A (K. 488), for which the irrepressibly charismatic pianist Jeremy Denk joined the orchestra. The airy, upbeat first movement was followed by an Andante of exquisite velvety inwardness, with moments of swelling tone and yearning expressivity that were all the more poignant for being reined in so quickly. Mr. Denk’s interplay with the orchestra’s individual soloists, like the fine clarinets, appeared easy and equal — a joy to watch.
A fiery rendition of Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 capped the evening. I’d always dismissed this work as an appealing but predictable exercise in the genre, but the Saint Paul players brought out its storm and stress jitters with stark color contrasts, breathless tempos and a delightfully uncouth, thick-soled Menuetto movement.
But perhaps my favorite moment came in the Andante, with its variations on a humble, placid tune. When it was time for the wind players to take the spotlight, the strings accompanied them with gentle undulating figures rendered with tangible care and attention to the expressive fluctuations of their colleagues’ playing. It became a touching example of how much the absence of a conductor encourages orchestral musicians to be supportive — and even protective — of one another.
Corinna da Fonseca-WollheimNew York Times
read moreChamber Orchestra of Europe/Antonio Pappano
May 24, 2018, Cite de la Musique, Paris
It’s always a little strange to hear pieces of composers who have not yet found themselves as artists. The Românesc Concert of Ligeti sounds as much as Bartók that it is sometimes difficult to find its signature, and even when you get there, the orchestra lingers little on the elements of writing that could have made it recognize. It is a choice, but the whole nostalgic and painful element of the work - which Ligeti had to leave behind while fleeing from his native country - is not made obvious. We note, however, the brilliance of the solo violin Steven Copes, whose solos were very well executed and capture the attention with a beautiful sound.
Julius LayBachtrack.comPro Arte Displays Jewels and Gems in Newton
For its first appearance in its 41st season, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, a unique cooperative chamber group of professional freelance musicians, offered three 19th-century works in the aptly titled “Jewels and Gems.” With Paul Polivnick conducting Saturday night in the highly-decorated sanctuary of the First Baptist Church in Newton Centre, there was much to appreciate.
In the crown jewel of the concert, which dazzled after the intermission, the Pro Arte and soloist Steven Copes delivered a lyrical, coherent and exciting rendition of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D Major (opus 61, 1806). The concertmaster of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Copes has performed Beethoven’s only violin concerto with them and others, and his sweet sound mesmerized the audience. This concerto, innovative as it is, from the first 5 Ds sounded by the tympani, is perhaps too often played and can seem hackneyed, even boring. Not so with this performance, which felt intimate yet declarative, revealing the revolutionary aspects that it contains—the very long introduction and the sense that the soloist is, in some sense, a commentator on the orchestral score and its many melodies. Copes, given his extensive chamber orchestra experience, interacted conversationally with the strings, sometimes playing along in the tutti, but contributing all the fire and verve required of the soloist. By the time he enters as soloist (at measure 89), four sonorous themes have already developed. The softly resonant second movement, did much with the innovative silences within the subtle variations. The striking and bejeweled architecture of the sanctuary allowed the sound to reverberate warmly, which worked very well in slow movements. Beethoven’s rollicking Rondo-Allegro, both conventional and exploratory, allowed both soloist and orchestra simultaneous playfulness and profundity. The cadenzas by violinist Robert Mann made a graceful addition to a delightful performance.
The other works served us well, starting with Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s sole orchestral piece, her Overture in C Major from 1831 (heard also in last week’s BSO concert, reviewed by Vance Koven HERE). Fanny, who, as most of us now know, was Felix’s older sister, collaborated closely with him. This concise overture offers a slow initial theme and then several enthusiastic bouts of melody, with Mendelssohnian orchestrations that lead me to wonder how much of Felix’s oeuvre might have been more than inspired by Fanny. But never mind. Polivnick inspired verve and mastery from the ensemble, though the echoic chancel created some blurring. The articulation and lines of the piece nevertheless came through with polish through Polivnick’s careful, charismatic technique.
The delightful performance was followed by a friendly repast in the adjoining church reception area, in which, many decades past, I was a Brownie. The audience drifted out into the freezing night filled with melodic memories and friendly post-concert greetings.
Julie Ingelfinger, is a classically-trained recreational pianist and music lover. She enjoys day jobs as professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, pediatric nephrologist at MassGeneral Hospital for Children at MGH and deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine.
Julie IngelfingerBoston Musical Intelligencer6/22/19
Steven Copes teamed up with Susan Grace for Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, music more suited for the main course. The duo captured every nuance of the French Basque master’s quirky, cartoonish score. Throughout
the three-movement work, Grace produced a sparkling, effervescent sound while Copes used his instrument to produce a parade of characterizations, each possessing a distinct color.
David SckolnikPeakradar.conConductorless SPCO makes the most of its freedom and talent
September 14, 2019
There is little in classical music more bracing than a crisply played Rossini overture, and the magic worked again on Friday evening at the opening concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s 2019-20 season.
“La Scala di Seta” may have a silly plot — a man climbs a ladder made of silk to visit his beloved every evening — but its overture is brilliantly entertaining, and showed the SPCO’s chattering violins to be in sparkling fettle after the summer recess.
It also gave an early opportunity for the orchestra’s new principal oboist, Cassie Pilgrim, to show her paces. Pilgrim spun an appealing line in her first lyrical solo, and nailed the dizzy-making string of faster notes Rossini gave her later.
Rossini’s influence also fizzled in the outer movements of Schubert’s Second Symphony. Again the string writing bubbled hyperactively, but a conductorless SPCO cannily stopped short of pushing the music into overdrive.
Judicious balancing of the different instrumental parts characterized the performance, especially in a nigh-perfect realization of the second movement Andante.
Its sunny variations smiled and lilted at a carefree pace, with elegant Mozartian stylings in the upper strings and a satisfying scrunch from the double basses in the minor-key variation.
Not for the first time since the SPCO moved to working mainly without a conductor, the freedom that the players enjoy to make their own decisions on interpreting the music was strikingly apparent.
The freshness and sensitivity of the performance were palpable, the symphony so organically integrated that the presence of a conductor on the podium would have seemed an intrusion.
Between the Schubert and Rossini pieces, SPCO artistic partner Jeremy Denk played the solo part and led the orchestra in Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
Denk is a thinking man’s pianist who writes for the New Yorker and has an acclaimed blog on his website titled “Think Denk.”
He talks a good game, too, and prefaced his performance of Schumann’s concerto with a witty disquisition on the role the dominant seventh chord plays in it.
Denk’s approach to the opening movement was notably flexible, at times feeling almost like improvisation. In Schumann that works well — moods flicker and flare unpredictably, and the orchestra adroitly shadowed Denk’s embrace of the mercurial.
The concerto’s middle movement can seem trite and inconsequential, but Denk found touching vulnerability in it, and the SPCO cellos contributed a poetic commentary.
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Denk reveled in the ebullience of the finale, although the lurking notion that its manic energies lack firm emotional underpinning is difficult to banish.
A more deep-rooted type of emotion came in Denk’s encore, a piece from Clara Schumann’s Op. 21 Romances. Written in 1853 when her husband, Robert, was suffering from mental illness, it has a doleful, haunting quality that Denk distilled powerfully.
The 200th anniversary of Clara’s birth fell on Friday, and Denk’s encore marked it movingly. Her music is slim in quantity, but of tantalizingly fine quality. We still don’t hear enough of it.
Terry BlainStar TribuneMarch 9, 2015- The night before, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra played next door in the brand-new Ordway Concert Hall, a handsome, 1,100-seat facility that opened this month.
The concert hall, designed for the chamber orchestra by architect Tim Carl and acoustician Paul Scarbrough, has a tall, narrow shoebox design and an undulating ceiling composed of wooden dowels that is transparent to sound. From a seat at the rear of the orchestra level, the excellent 34-musician SPCO, led from the first chair by concertmaster Steven Copes, sounded bright and present, with chamber-music clarity. Woodwind solos leapt to the fore in Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, and Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” showed off the space’s resonance—the pianissimo strings were fully audible and the questioning trumpet, played from the second balcony, rang out clearly. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, energetically performed, got big and beefy without losing clarity.
Heidi WalesonWall Street Journal
read moreJonathan Cohen is on a Haydn kick. As one of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s artistic partners, the English conductor, harpsichordist and cellist has been using recent visits to conduct some of Joseph Haydn’s 104 symphonies and man the cello for a string quartet version of his “Seven Last Words of Christ.” This weekend, Cohen’s at the harpsichord, leading the SPCO in a program of three early Haydn symphonies, the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth, which bear the nicknames, “Morning,” “Noon” and “Evening.”
On Friday night at the Ordway Concert Hall, Cohen and the orchestra delivered an exquisitely played snapshot of where Haydn was in his musical development at the age of 29. It started with a bold assertion of the young composer’s groundbreaking vision, went a bit more retro with a nod to his baroque predecessors, then finished with a symphony that reused a lot of elements from the two played before it.
My reaction to the performance (again, all played wonderfully) was thus: “Morning” was adventurous and exciting; “Noon” was enlightening; and “Evening” gave me déjà vu. Was this a little too much Haydn? Perhaps. Or at least a little too narrow a slice of the composer’s creative output. Yet it’s a fine forum for the gifts of musicians throughout the SPCO, with Haydn generously spreading around the solos.
Is it worth braving below-zero temperatures to experience? If you were to ask me after the Sixth Symphony (“Morning”), I’d say, “By all means.” Beginning with a splendidly evocative gradual crescendo from virtual silence (a sunrise?), the opening movement was bursting with vigor, violinist Steven Copes and each of the principal wind players trading phrases like bantering songbirds. The slow movement bore a gentle sadness, Copes and principal cellist Julie Albers exchanging wistful lines. Flutist Julia Bogorad-Kogan pulled the mood back toward joyous dancing on the minuet and finale.
That performance left me marveling at how innovative the symphony was for being written in 1761, only two years after the death of baroque-era titan George Frideric Handel. This was such a stylistic departure from the norm.
But soon the Seventh Symphony (“Noon”) had me thinking, “Oh, here’s Handel now.” The sonorous horn duos sang out boisterously – something Handel loved to do in his Concerti Grosso and “Water Music” – and the opening of the slow movement is even marked “Recitativo,” echoing in structure the narrative recitatives from such oratorios as “Messiah.” It featured more fine work by Copes, Albers and Bogorad-Kogan, with bassist Nathan Farrington joining the colloquy with a lithe yet muscular solo on the minuet.
“Evening” (No. 8) introduced a few new ideas, including the sense of humor that came to be a Haydn trademark. It emerged with a smile-inducing piece of musical misdirection in the first movement. But too much of the Eighth felt like variations on what was already offered on the Sixth and Seventh (reflecting back on the day, perhaps?), right down to a bass solo on the minuet.
Again borrowing from a popular baroque trend, Haydn evoked a storm on the finale (“La tempesta”), with plenty of thunder and lightning and Cohen’s harpsichord tinkling like raindrops. For those about to head out into the arctic air, it perhaps sparked anticipation of spring.
Rob HubbardSt. Paul Pioneer Press
read moreThey brought a similar sharpness and artistry to a new Violin Concerto by American composer Pierre Jalbert, which had its world premiere at Friday morning's concert at the Ordway in St. Paul.
SPCO concertmaster Steven Copes played the jagged, hyperactive solo part with biting attack and a superfine sense of tuning.
The concerto's most arresting music came in the outer sections of the opening movement, where slithering piano glissandos and twinkling percussion meshed with wispy violins to conjure a magically airborne texture.
In between, and for much of the second movement, Jalbert's music was dominated by edgy, yakking rhythms that seemed to value a raw sense of propulsive dynamism over more expansive, lyrical material.
Copes' account of the truculent cadenza was masterly.
Terry BlainStar Tribune
read moreAfter the bubbling, swirling underwater fantasia that is Mendelssohn’s “Fair Melusina” Overture, SPCO concertmaster Steven Copes took the stage as soloist for Jalbert’s Violin Concerto. By turns haunting and menacing in the early going, the two-movement concerto became an absorbing meditation on which Copes’ lines grew more agitated, the orchestra summoning up dark drama. Often taking on an antiphonal structure — Copes and the other violins engaging in a kind of call-and-response exchange — the first movement exploded into a climactic cadenza before Copes articulated a compelling longing atop vaporous, whispering strings.
The concerto’s second movement had a more fragmented feel, themes often introduced and abandoned, but Copes wove a transfixing spell atop Jalbert’s evocative orchestration, be the ensemble chiming like funeral bells or providing a glassy, glimmering foundation for the soloist’s aggressive final cadenza.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreOrlando Phil Adds Twist Of Berg To Its Season Opener
October, 11, 2016
ORLANDO – Music from the Second Viennese School is something of a rare bird on classical concert programs in Central Florida, which has traditionally favored standard repertoire. But the Orlando Philharmonic has more recently welcomed 20th century and contemporary pieces, thanks not least to Eric Jacobsen, the progressive New York-bred conductor and cellist currently serving his second season as music director of Orlando’s foremost classical music organization.
A founding member of the genre-bending string quartet Brooklyn Rider, Jacobsen stepped away from his cellist seat in early 2016 to focus on his blossoming conducting career. Selected for the Philharmonic’s top artistic position after an intensive two-year international search, Jacobsen, 34, is also a co-founder and artistic director of the chamber orchestra The Knights and is serving his third season as music director of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony in Connecticut.
With a superlative grip on orchestral forces and his distinctive youthful flair, Jacobsen remarkably lifted the ensemble to higher artistic ground on the Philharmonic’s season opener Oct. 1, at downtown Orlando’s Bob Carr Theater. Adding spice to a program weighted with Russian masterworks was Berg’s Violin Concerto of 1935.
Steven Copes, concertmaster of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and avid performer of contemporary music, was the soloist. But before launching into the piece, Copes and Jacobsen – with accompaniment from the orchestra – previewed several sections. The demonstration covered no fewer than five sections (including two waltzes, one folk song, and a timpani-led passage with Jacobsen clapping along to the irregular beat), as well as the mournful Bach chorale that caps the concerto. There was no mention, however, of the most alluring aspect of the piece: Berg’s lyrical 12-tone theme that forms the thematic basis for most of it.
At the request of violinist Louis Krasner, who commissioned the piece in the last year of the composer’s life, Berg accomplished a fusion of the lyrical qualities of the Romantic tradition and the mathematical method of 12-tone composition. The chamber orchestra reduction by Faradsch Karaew, used for this performance, brings the string section down to a compact two violins, and one each of viola, cello, and bass, which sounded especially clear and attuned to each other.
Playing from a score, Copes shaped his phrases with elan, managing subtle crescendos as he climbed up the fret board in swirly patterns. In quieter phrases during the first movement, though, he tended to get buried under the busy texture in the ensemble. But then again he was vehement and acrid in the second half of the concerto, matching the prevalent unsettling mood.
In the allegro section of the second movement the ensemble captured the anxious dissonance of the opening chord, even with reduced instrumentation. With riveting work from horn and trombone, adjacent tones piled up into a jarring expressionistic cluster in one of the concerto’s harshest moments.
And finally the consonance of the Bach chorale “Es ist genug” (“It is enough”), from his cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 60), arrived as a semblance of hope – a fitting end to a concerto inspired by the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter. Soulfully intoned by the woodwinds and then taken by the soloist, the chorale sounded blissful in its tonal stability, coming after a tortuous journey that Jacobsen described as “incredibly painful.” Featuring well-balanced ensemble interplay, the first-time Philharmonic performance of the concerto captured the full semi-expressionistic flavor of Berg’s most widely performed instrumental work.
Esteban MenesesClassical Voice America
read moreThe Amadeus you don’t know steals the show at SPCO
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February 18, 2016
Chances are that you’ve never heard of Karl Amadeus Hartmann. That’s understandable when you consider that he was a German composer who chose to stay in Germany and openly resist the regime as Nazism took hold, World War II grew and most European composers became exiles. Hartmann’s music was banned in his native land, but, amazingly, he survived and went on to spearhead a revival of Munich’s musical culture after the war.
If you have any question as to how Hartmann felt about the Nazis and what they unleashed upon Europe, you’ll find his answer in his “Concerto Funebre,” a dark and powerful violin concerto that he wrote in 1939 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It’s being given a gripping interpretation at this weekend’s St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts with the orchestra’s concertmaster, Steven Copes, as soloist. On Thursday evening at Minneapolis’ Plymouth Congregational Church, Copes and the SPCO strings skillfully articulated the paradoxical combination of hope and despair in this fascinating work, producing something haunting and hypnotic, then aggressive and explosive, and finally resilient and life-affirming.
It was the exciting, absorbing centerpiece of a concert of music from Germany and Austria. Knowing of the darkness that lay ahead, it was perhaps wise to start the evening with lighter fare from Hartmann’s German contemporary, Paul Hindemith, his “Kleine Kammermusik” for woodwind quintet. It was given a bright and ethereal reading interrupted by the troubled tones of a mournful march.
Then Copes countered with a deep and powerful Hartmann concerto, bringing grace and fluidity to its first two movements before becoming the voice of individuality and resistance amid the explosions around him. The third movement sounded something like a musical anxiety attack, full of fury and fear, but calm and strength returned in a noble, resilient finale. It was a triumph for Copes and a marvelous showcase for his gifts.
Ron HubbardPioneer Press
read moreJan. 15, 2016
Call it musical diplomacy. On Friday morning, conductor Scott Yoo tried to negotiate a peace treaty between an audience at St. Paul's Ordway Concert Hall and the "Second Viennese School" style of the early 20th century, which can prove difficult listening for ears accustomed to Bach and Mozart. This "Notable Encounter" was something like a music history lecture with onstage musicians demonstrating the key points, followed by a complete performance of the work. One can assume it's something the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra will do with other works if this weekend's offering is well received.
This may sound like an East Metro take on the Minnesota Orchestra's "Inside the Classics" concerts, but I don't recall the Minnesota Orchestra ever taking on something as complex and potentially confounding as Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin and 13 Wind Instruments. Yoo did an admirable job of making the music as accessible as possible and explaining forbidding concepts like the 12-tone system and Berg's over-under-sideways-down way of creating variations.
And, after intermission, Yoo and the 15 musicians gave as strong an interpretation of the Berg work as you're ever likely to experience, especially violinist Steven Copes and pianist Anna Polonsky. Friday morning's performance proved impeccable, pianist Polonsky drawing out the hidden hypnotic lyricism in the first movement and violinist Copes bringing passion, physicality and tremendous technical versatility to a demanding work that could be described as a violin sonata with wind ensemble. And each member of that ensemble impressed.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreAugust 09, 2015
If the Curtis Institute of Music isn't careful, it may disturb Philadelphia's self-satisfied parochialism even more than it has. Summerfest, Curtis' summer camp, has proved how powerfully the city benefits from importing talent beyond the usual sources while folding it into the school's own.
Of course, Curtis can have it both ways. Though some of the faculty performing Thursday night at the last in a new series of three Summerfest recitals were from orchestras elsewhere, most were, in a sense, of here - Curtis graduates.
You may not have caught Steven Copes as a student in the 1990s. Now, he is concertmaster of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and, returning to Curtis, he was a knockout.
This summer series - which, by the way, roundly killed the myth that there was no summer audience for classical in the city - has also been a crash course in the music of Curtis dean David Ludwig. Here, his work deepened the impression that stylistically he is hard to pin down. You might have put him in the melancholy-meditative-minimalist camp after hearing his score to Michael Almereyda's urban-decay-chic-film take on Cymbeline. Last week at Curtis, Pale Blue Dot was a journey through cold space (dissonance) and humanity (traditional harmony). On Thursday, Swan Song evoked Ravel in the opening, explicitly quoted Schubert near the end, and raised the spirit of a particularly memorable heaving-sigh gesture in the Berg Violin Concerto (itself a swan song that quotes another composer). More than clever, Ludwig's work raises its own tender message of spirituality. Copes was its ardent advocate, with pianist Amy J. Yang expert in its manifold demands.
Peter DobrinPhiladelphia Inquirer
read moreMay 31, 2015
Given what we now know about Robert Schumann’s bipolar personality, it almost seems like a cheap shot to call his beloved Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op. 44, manic. According to his biographers, however, he did sketch the entire work in a few days and produced the finished score in a mere two weeks’ time.
With the exception of the strange, marchlike second movement, the rest of this Piano Quintet blisters relentlessly across the stage at dangerous and unforgivingly daunting tempos, a challenge that Mainly Mozart’s performers undertook Saturday (May 30) at the Auditorium at TSRI without the slightest indication of strain or undue exertion.
Pianist Jon Kimura Parker set the pace, his bright, keen-edged figurations vigorously cutting through the string quartet without overpowering his colleagues. I thought violinist Steven Copes mirrored more closely Parker’s stylish, acute phrasing and articulations, although his colleagues—violinist Alexander Kerr, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and cellist Efe Baltacigil—brought equal virtuosity to the table.
Shrouding the slow second movement in hazy, spectral colors gave an otherworldly aura to the march’s curious hesitations, as did Huang’s throaty, macabre viola solos.
Parker’s technical brilliance in the Scherzo, which Schumann snarkily marked molto vivace, fooled some of the audience into thinking it was the Quintet’s concluding movement. Although Schumann’s final movement lacks the dazzle of his Scherzo, the ensemble projected an unexpected jocular interpretation of the its fugal sections that provided some of the program’s most rewarding moments.
The string quartet worked up to the Schumann with Mozart’s bagatelle, the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, and Beethoven’s early String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4. From their program bios, it does not appear that these four string players regularly work together, and their opening Mozart displayed more individual muscle and assertion than fluid teamwork, and the ensemble’s dynamic contrasts were few.
Their account of Beethoven C Minor String Quartet, however, displayed more focus and balance among the players. They provided ample aristocratic elegance in Beethoven’s Scherzo, a more polite movement that, unlike Schumann’s Scherzo, looked back to Mozartean models. I was charmed by Copes’ warm, effusive themes in the Menuetto and stirred by the group’s unalloyed verve in the finale.
Ken HermanSan Diego Story
read moreST. PAUL, March 8, 2015 — While the world has many splendid opera houses and orchestra halls, performance spaces ideally suited to chamber orchestras of, say, 30 to 35 players, are rarer. These ensembles are like hybrids between chamber groups and full orchestras. What’s needed is a hall that allows clarity and detail in the playing to come through while providing orchestral resonance and bloom.
The impressive St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, currently in its 56th season, probably the leading ensemble of its kind in America, has never had such a home. Now it does. On Thursday the orchestra presented a gala program here to celebrate its new Concert Hall, an inviting, acoustically ideal, 1,100-seat auditorium here at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.
Before a sold-out audience on Friday night (the second performance of the program), the orchestra gave inspired accounts of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” the premiere of George Tsontakis’s “Coraggio” for String Orchestra, and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, all without a conductor. You could sense the excitement of the musicians over their new home, especially during the Beethoven, as the players leaned forward in their seats, listening to one another intently. Inner voices and solo lines came through beautifully. Yet the overall sound had symphonic depth and, during big climaxes, plenty of heft.
After the Ordway Center opened in 1985, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra played most of its concerts in the complex’s Ordway Music Theater, a 1,900-seat proscenium auditorium that is home to the Minnesota Opera but was problematic for a chamber orchestra.
Discussions about creating a designated hall for the orchestra began some 10 years ago. The first idea was to renovate the Ordway Music Theater. Instead, the center turned to an underused component of the complex, the McKnight Theater, a 315-seat black-box space. The architect Tim Carl, of Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, and the acoustician Paul Scarbrough devised a plan to turn the theater into a fitting chamber orchestra hall. The existing footprint of the space was nearly doubled. To prevent sound from being sucked up into the high ceiling, it is covered with wavy panels of warm wood dowels. There are rows of seats behind the stage, for a chorus or for concertgoers, which fosters intimacy between the audience and the musicians.
This $42 million project comes at a crucial time and should help the orchestra and its supporters move past the troubles of recent years.
The classical music scene in the Twin Cities was rocked by bitter labor negotiations at the Minnesota Orchestra, which resulted in a long, debilitating lockout of the players by the administration that ended in early 2014. That story overshadowed similar strife at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which had a lockout lasting six months, ending in the spring of 2013. There was turnover among the musicians during the lockout and the roster now includes some younger, eager new players.
From the sound of the orchestra during Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, it seemed that the musicians have already adjusted to the new hall and its acoustics. During the sprightly, slyly decorous Allegro movement, they were able to nudge offbeat accents and sudden fortissimo chords without any sense of pushing. In the bustling finale, there was striking clarity to crisscrossing lines and spiky harmonies. I have seldom heard this familiar Neo-Classical score sound so multilayered and contemporary.
The Ives was added to the program, as Kyu-Young Kim, the orchestra’s principal second violin, explained to the audience, because the piece can demonstrate a hall’s acoustics. The strings, placed onstage, played the subdued diatonic chords and scale patterns that provide the aural foundation of the music. From high in the second balcony a solo trumpet posed the cosmic question, while from behind the porous backstage wall woodwinds intruded with jarring Ivesian outbursts. In his remarks, Mr. Kim also paid tribute to the construction workers who were, he said, true partners in this endeavor. In the lobby it was moving to see photos of some of these workers, holding hammers and drills, their instruments, interspersed with photos of musicians.
The Tsontakis, though a premiere, was not completely new. “Coraggio” is a fresh arrangement of a movement from that composer’s 30-year-old String Quartet No. 3. The music shifts between passages of slippery, out-of-focus tonal harmonies and episodes of rustic dance, like tart, fractured fiddle-faddle. It’s an appealing piece and was vibrantly played. But in this context it seemed more conventional than the Ives.
The concertmaster Steven Copes was the de-facto leader of the “Eroica” Symphony performance. For a decade now the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has done without a music director and instead collaborates with shifting artistic partners. The musicians give many performances without a conductor, depending on the program.
If there was occasionally a passage in the Beethoven where coordination among the players was a little imprecise, the trade-off was music-making of in-the-moment brio. Details that seldom stand out were vividly audible here, especially in the orchestra’s somber, organic account of the great slow movement, the funeral march.
The final ovation was enormous. In a way, the audience may have been applauding itself as well for supporting this orchestra through some bad times and making this new home possible.
Anthony TommasiniNew York Times
read more2/27/15
The main attraction was pianist Jeremy Denk, the recently christened SPCO artistic partner who bookended the program with two J.S. Bach Keyboard Concertos, culminating in an exciting take on the First Concerto's finale. But this was a concert at which one of the world's most famous composers shared equal billing with -- and may have been upstaged by -- one considerably less lauded.
That would be Leos Janacek, a Czech composer of the early 20th century, who was represented by two 1920s works of radically different tenors. One was his haunting Violin Sonata, given a gripping reading by SPCO concertmaster Steven Copes and pianist Denk. The other was a lilting, lyrical, folk-flavored work for wind sextet called "Mladi" or "Youth," the only major-key piece on a program full of darker-hued music, and one that the wind players filled with joy and exuberant solos.
Five string players performed a transcription of a sad madrigal of lost love by Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo that fit with the evening's somewhat troubled tone, a mood at its most compelling during the Janacek Violin Sonata, when Copes' violin violently exploded into lovely, languid phrases from Denk's piano. Written as World War I was exploding across Europe, the sonata summoned up an aura of trepidation.
If that work sounded like Janacek the modernist, the ensuing "Mladi" tapped into his primitive side, drawing upon the folk forms of his native land to enwrap the audience in a warmth suitable for a circle dance around a forest bonfire.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreReview: Let the SPCO send you into summer with memorable Mozart
Hello again, Rice Park, you’re looking good. Goodbye, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra: See you in the fall.
After a 2018-19 concert season during which SPCO audience members gazed out the towering windows of St. Paul’s Ordway Center upon a fenced-in park undergoing renovation, the year-long project is at last complete. And there are few better reasons to go downtown and stroll on the park’s expanded plaza and new circular cobblestone sidewalks than on your way into one of the SPCO’s final concerts of the season.
Just as New York has long hosted a summer festival called Mostly Mozart, so could recent SPCO concert programming share that description. In fact, the final concerts are entirely Mozart, but there’s little danger of the orchestra taking a perfunctory approach to familiar fare, if Friday evening’s concert is any indication. It was a performance full of energy and conviction, a seemingly concerted effort to transform a potential “out with a whimper” scenario into a decided bang.
The whimpers might come from those disappointed that the always-impressive Swedish clarinetist Martin Frost has withdrawn from these concerts due to injury (and, hence, has ended his term as an SPCO artistic partner). He was slated to not only perform his acclaimed musical collage, “Genesis,” but to conduct Mozart’s Overture to “Don Giovanni” and “Prague” Symphony as well. However, the orchestra seemed intent upon demonstrating that it doesn’t need conductors.
That came through in the “Don Giovanni” Overture, which established an ominous mood, and kept its gravitas even when the music shifted in a lighter direction. It was a spirited interpretation full of delicious dynamic contrast.
The orchestra took a similarly self-directed route on Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for Violin, Viola and Orchestra. This was the addition to the program drafted into duty upon Frost’s cancellation, and the soloists from the SPCO handled the new task sublimely. The orchestra’s concertmaster, violinist Steven Copes — in addition to providing direction to the ensemble on every piece — was one of the two soloists on the concert’s centerpiece, proving an ebullient, bouncy counterpoint to the more firm and straightforward violist, Hyobi Sim, he ethereal, she earthy.
The high point of the Sinfonia Concertante was its slow center. Making an argument for his skills as an opera composer, the 23-year-old Mozart created something that sounds like a soprano and tenor exchanging lyrical lines of love and longing. Sim established her independence from the work’s pattern of asking her to be the “response” in a call-and-response structure, and she also matched Copes’ showy lines, complemented on the finale by the dancing tones of the French horns and oboes (including new principal oboist Cassie Pilgrim making her debut).
Originally, Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony (No. 38) was slated to be the middle piece on the program, but the SPCO musicians seemed determined to assert that it could provide a grand finale to the season. They demonstrated that you don’t need a conductor to make lithe leaps from soft sweetness to thunderous explosions and back again. It was the most exciting “Prague” Symphony I’ve heard in several years, the woodwinds swirling in exquisite balance, the delicate tiptoeing of the slow movement wonderfully shaped, and the finale full of dramatic abandon. Many a patron was sent off into Rice Park humming or whistling one of the concert’s multiple earworms.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press1/16/15
So the crowd at Minneapolis' Temple Israel was smiling at intermission, buoyed by a very involving interpretation of the Mendelssohn concerto by the orchestra's concertmaster, Steven Copes. If some of the sprightly spirit in its finale was reprised on the concert-closing performance of Beethoven's Second Symphony, this might have been one of this winter's most ebullient concerts. But the SPCO chose to paint the Beethoven in darker shades, forsaking pep in favor of gravitas. Yet plenty of afterglow remained from the Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn's E-minor Concerto is always part of the conversation when discussing history's greatest violin concertos, but it's not as much a flashy showpiece as an extended lyrical aria, a passionate conversation between soloist and orchestra.
Copes showed off his ample digital dexterity on a fiery first-movement cadenza and brought out all of the Andante's soulful balladry. And the finale was suitably raucous, the choir of woodwinds matching Copes for puckish charm.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read more7/18/2014; Chamber Music Northwest, Portland, OR
After intermission, violinists Bella Hristova and Steven Copes delivered a mind-boggling performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins. Together they danced through a score that was laced with, double stops, fast pizzicatos, high-wire passages, and fast, tricky phrases. They seamlessly passed lines back and forth, and their dynamics were mostly in agreement. The head pair made a headlong rush into the finale that brought the piece to a thrilling conclusion.
James BashNorthwest Reverb
read more'SPCO is back doing what it does best'
9/6/2013
After a summer of silence and a year-long lockout of the equally esteemed ensemble to its west, the Minnesota Orchestra, Friday night presented a powerful reminder of what first-rate performances of masterful music can do to stir your soul.
It was there in the exuberant yet meaty interpretation of the Bach suite and in the thrilling showmanship of concertmaster Steven Copes on the pseudo-violin concerto housed within Mozart's "Haffner" Serenade.
The half a "Haffner" the SPCO offered was a terrific showcase for not only Copes' musicianship, but for his playfulness, inserting snippets of other Mozart works into his cadenzas and employing the rough-edged abandon of a rural folk fiddler on the digitally demanding Rondo. It felt like Copes was asserting that orchestra concerts aren't just inspiring, but can be a lot of fun, too.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreThe opening subject of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 can sound Rococo, almost fey, in some hands, but even before it grew to its full strength here there was a muscularity to the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s delivery (directed by Andsnes from the keyboard) that spoke of the strength to come, and threw down the gauntlet in the battle the concerto enacts between soloist and tutti. The woody mesh of tone created by the orchestra is perhaps their greatest strength – a carefully balanced texture through which a whole palette of colours can be refracted, as they later demonstrated so comprehensively in Stravinsky’s Apollo musagète.
Stravinsky’s ballet Apollo musagète offered a mid-concert showcase for the strings of Europe’s greatest overgrown youth orchestra, directed by Concertmaster Steven Copes. While outwardly much more conservative than the composer’s more familiar works for the Ballets Russes The Rite of Spring or The Firebird, Apollo merely pays lip-service to conformity, treating conventions of musical form and dance with a playful subversion.
Performed by the MCO the work’s bluesy, neoclassical textures emerged both charming and witty, alive from the block chords that herald the Prologue, through Copes’s characterful solo variation as Apollo himself, and on through Terpsichore’s deliciously drunken, wayward Viennese dance to the ecstatic close of the Apotheose.
Alexandra CoghlanNew Statesman
read morePerforming as both conductor and soloist, Andsnes led his regular collaborators in Beethoven’s First and Third Piano Concertos, leaving them under the direction of Concertmaster Steven Copes for Stravinsky’s Apollo musagète. The recording sessions Andsnes and the orchestra have just completed have created a gelled, natural partnership that needs little from Andsnes apart from the occasional turn as traffic cop. The ensemble’s vivid energy is balanced by their control, and although characterful the opposition between soloist and tutti in the First Piano Concerto was never less than poised.
There was nothing polite about the Stravinsky however. Languorous and unashamedly ribald by turns, Stravinsky’s ballet score leapt into far-from-classical life in the strings of the MCO. While the variations found them witty and Copes’s own solo brought new gravitas to the deity, it was the ecstatic Apothéose that saw the orchestra at their finest. Bows dug deep into strings, reaching for for block chords that physically forced their way into the hall, knocking air out of you before suddenly releasing the bloom of their tone.
Alexandra CoghlanThe Arts Desk
read moreNov. 20, 2012
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1997, has established a reputation as one of the finest chamber orchestras in the world. Their relatively small size was obvious here in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, more often a host of much larger ensembles. The musicians were also clustered tightly around the piano, which was placed in the centre of the group and positioned so that the pianist’s back would be to the audience.
As we waited for the overture to begin, there was a sense of expectation that Andsnes might come on stage to conduct it. However, the orchestra suddenly began playing under the subtle yet authoritative direction of concertmaster Steven Copes. Clearly used to performing without a conductor, the ensemble was absolutely secure throughout the evening. The orchestra sported a lean yet cultured sound. Throughout, vibrato in the strings was used sparingly with woodwind lines lovingly played. In the dramatic overture, inspired by Heinrich von Collin’s tragedy Coriolan, punctuating chords were played with gunshot accents and precision. The scene was set for the Third Piano Concerto, composed in the same key of C minor, which featured at the end of this programme.
Peter MarksBachtrack.com
read moreThe Overture to Richard Strauss' final opera, "Capriccio," is a string sextet being performed for the opera's characters in the setting of an elegant salon. The chamber ensemble Accordo opened their third season with it on Monday evening, in their new home at Christ Church Lutheran in south Minneapolis. The setting might not be as plush as a salon, but it was certainly acoustically resplendent.
The clean, mid-century modernist architecture, by esteemed Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, is on the National Historic Registry. The striking blending of light brick and blonde wood projects a bright sound of ringing clarity, but with enough reverberation to perfectly complement Strauss' grand Romantic score.
The quintet is made up of St. Paul Chamber Orchestra violinists Steven Copes and Ruggero Allifranchini, violist Maiya Papach and cellist Ronald Thomas, along with Minnesota Orchestra cellist Anthony Ross and guest artist Minnesota Orchestra violist Rebecca Albers. The six instrumentalists produced a rich, resonant sound, but were also capable of moments of refined delicacy.
The centerpiece of the program was Arnold Schoenberg's tone poem "Verklärte Nacht" ("Transfigured Night"). This late Romantic composition came before his conversion to 12-tone music.
Written in 1899, this is Schoenberg's Opus 4, a work of his youth. The poem on which it's based, by Richard Dahmer, is also a work of youthful sentimentality. In the first part, a woman confesses that the child she's carrying is not her lover's. In the second, he forgives her, and the night is transfigured. Though Schoenberg later disparaged the work's programmatic associations, the tone poem is very clear in its drama. Albers' viola gave plaintive voice to the woman's grief. And Copes effectively conveyed the transformative power of the lover's absolution. The intense melodies and complex chromatic harmonies created a passionate piece of musical storytelling.
The concert concluded with a rousing rendition of Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence." The title comes from the fact that he wrote one of the principal themes while visiting Italy, but the work is distinctly Russian-sounding in its use of folk melodies. Allifranchini took full advantage of the lead violin part.
Accordo's third season is off to a great start. With luck, Christ Church Lutheran will be it's home for many seasons to come.
William Randall BeardStar Tribune
read moreKorngold's Violin Concerto refracted the brightness into the Ordway interior with a warm and stirring performance that featured the orchestra's
concertmaster, Steven Copes, as soloist. Copes is a Los Angeles native, and he proved quite skilled at Hollywood heartstring tugging. Copes coaxed swooning reveries in the Romance before unleashing his inner folk fiddler on the fanciful Finale. He threw himself into the interpretation with theatricality worthy of an Oscar.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreAfter a financial crisis at its home hall, the Southern Theater, left it homeless, this talented quintet of string players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra likely saw dark days ahead. But then offers of help started pouring in: The Schubert Club wanted to present their concerts. And Northrop Auditorium's concerts and lectures department. And the Southern's onetime music maven, Kate Nordstrum, now with the SPCO.
And maybe most important of all: Minneapolis' Christ Church Lutheran, which asked if the group wanted to perform its concerts there. All of this good fortune came together Monday night for the opening of the group's three-concert spring season.
And a wonderful one it was, a performance bursting with electricity and urgency. Performing three works for string sextet, Accordo produced something far more intense and exciting than most would imagine chamber music could be.
Opening with the overture from Richard Strauss' last opera, "Capriccio," the sextet established a tone of romance and passion that held throughout the evening. Paradoxical tones of sadness and transcendence emerged on the
Strauss, and violinist Steven Copes and cellist Anthony Ross let the passion pour forth.
But the performance by which this concert will be remembered was an intense and emotionally evocative interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," in its original six-musician incarnation. In Accordo's hands, it became an inspiring journey from dark despair to shimmering triumph, full of drama and musicianship both precise and powerful. No operatic aria could convey such a sense of desperate longing.
And the concluding performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" also reached a fever pitch of swoon-ready romanticism, the six musicians pouring their hearts into the interpretation.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
read moreUbiquitous in jazz and hip-hop, borrowing is scarcely less common in the music known as classical. For evidence, look no farther than this week's concerts by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, led by Rossen Milanov and featuring violinist Steven Copes, the orchestra's formidable concertmaster, as soloist.
The concerto, as the composer put it, was written "more for a Caruso than a Paganini" -- despite its fearsome technical demands, its essence is lyrical, not virtuosic. Copes, his tone gorgeous, his zest palpable, did full justice to both dimensions. He executed Korngold's bewitching "Romance," the piece's heart, with marvelous poignancy; its dissolving close was a full-body goose-bump moment. And by the end he'd found the sense of ease and spaciousness I'd missed at first.
Larry FuchsbergStar Tribune
read moreI stood in my stall in rapture last night, listening to the most amazing interpretation I’ve ever heard of Brahms’ Op. 8, B Major Piano Trio at the closing concert of the Cartagena International Music Festival in Colombia.
I’m not sure I will ever hear it played in such a sensitive, viscerally connected, narratively taut, yet masterfully paced way again — by an ad hoc trio that fitted in scant rehearsal time between other concerts and giving masterclasses to young musicians.
The experience encapsulated the full, true, fragile, ephemeral attraction of the live concert. A live recording, as good as most are, can’t reproduce that special spark of the moment.
To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, live music is like a delicate, exotic fruit; record it, and the bloom is gone.
After the concert, all sorts of other paradoxes came floating up into consciousness.
I had travelled to the Southern Hemisphere to drool over a piece played by three people from the Northern Hemisphere (violinist Steven Copes, cellist Alicia Weilerstein and pianist Brian Ganz). I was in the New World listening to the quintessence of the Old World.
John TeraudsMusical Toronto
read moreMay 2, 2011: Leila Josefowicz & the SPCO at Mandel Hall
Schnittke’s Moz-Art à la Haydn for two violins and strings is a performance piece that needs to be seen to be fully experienced. But since the afternoon light was pouring in from the arched windows of the hall, the opening and closing sequences, intended to be played in complete darkness, didn’t quite come off. The musicians by default were forced to concentrate on the incongruous and witty music rather than the staging, which was just fine.
The piece, written in 1977, is a postmodern pastiche of styles and attitudes, with ample opportunity for the two soloists to glitter. Josefowicz and the equally virtuosic Steven Copes, the group’s concertmaster, played their parts admirably and the Alice-in-Wonderland sonic pile-up was brought off with great humor.
Gerald FisherChicago Classical Review
read moreThere is a part of the classical-music world that has for so long made a desperate attempt to cast off the art's perceived starchiness that the desperation has become as traditional as the starch. And then there is the Boston Chamber Music Society, which, like an enduring fine-dining monument, maintains old-fashioned ways at such a high level that one is reacquainted with their virtues.
Saturday's concert, the last of BCMS's summer series at Longy's Pickman Hall, followed a predictable programming pattern: a contemporary hors d'oeurve followed by entrees of 19th-century standards. The tuxedos were pressed, the applause was ritually withheld between movements. But formality doesn't always create distance, sometimes it collapses it; the thoughtfulness and accomplishment of the playing was consistently stimulating, even when a garnish or ingredient wasnԴ exactly to one's liking. It was enough to draw a healthy crowd, even in the face of an approaching hurricane.
Violinist Steven Copes and violist Maiya Papach presented the first course, selections from George Tsontakis's Knickknacks, a polystylistic anthology of short duos. The music tries out various roles - minimalist cheer in Shuffling, Latin drama in Fandango Facade - but most of the pieces revealed a core of sinuous, austere counterpoint. (Only Bumpkinesque, a fiddle-powered engine revving hard in second gear, defied the pattern.) Copes and Papach, fellow principals in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (where Copes premiered Tsontakis's Second Violin Concerto a few years ago), had ample flair to set off the more sober passages.
Ronald Thomas, BCMS's emeritus director, was joined by pianist Benjamin Hochman for the Opus 38 Cello Sonata of Johannes Brahms. It is a youthful piece, at least by the self-critical Brahms's standards. Thomas and Hochman seemed eager to connect the music to even earlier influences: Schumannesque lieder, Haydnesque lissomeness. Brahms was flexing his mastery of forms bequeathed by history - sonata, minuet, fugue - but the unhurried, slow-burn performance downplayed structural mass in favor of pointing out graceful outlines and details. Their sound contributed: Thomas's fine-drawn tone, gauzy and deep in the bass, wiry and buzzy up high; Hochman's classical lightness, gliding over the top of the keys rather than digging in. One might have wished for more gravity in the fugal Allegro finale, which instead came out preciously crisp.
But Hochman's persistent polish was perfect for Gabriel Fauré's Opus 15 Piano Quartet, another statement of grandly emotive youth, in which the piano's role is essentially iridescent; Copes, Papach, and Thomas spread rich, heavy cloth, which Hochman embroidered with silvery crewel. The Quartet's expansiveness demands architectural intelligence and heady perfume, and this reading delivered on both counts: high-powered conversation, intricately indulgent. To spend time in such old-school, refined company is a fleeting pleasure, but, then again, arenԴ they all? BCMS makes a welcome habit of maintaining timeless oases.
Matthew GuarrieriBoston GlobeBOSTON CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY: Tsontakis, Brahms, Fauré
Steven Copes, violin, Maiya Papach, viola, Benjamin Hochman, piano, Ronald Thomas, cello
August 27, 2011
This concert took place the night before Hurricane Irene was scheduled to come through. Nevertheless, the auditorium was quite full. They crowd came out to hear three works performed by the Boston Chamber Music Society: Knickknacks for Violin and Piano by George Tsontakis, Cello Sonata in E minor by Johannes Brahms, and Piano Quartet in C minor by Gabriel Fauré.
I wasn’t familiar with Tsontakis, just a little nervous about the piece from the title he’d chosen. I was prepared to hear an eclectic work, invoking a variety of styles from a wide variety of musical genres. And so it was. From the start of first movement, “Shufflling,” his arpeggios suggested minimalism; there were echoes of the late Beethoven string quartets; there was a cakewalk-like section; there were harmonies that reminded me of Philip Glass’s 5th string quartet. (You should listen to that quartet even if you are certain you dislike Glass.) I heard echoes of Bartok and Prokofiev. But altogether, the movement stood well by itself.
The other movements offered contrasts. “Goodnight Lullaby” gave us a short ostinato figure from the violin in its high register. There were more late Beethoven harmonies. “Fandango Facade” seemed to emanate from a late romantic spirit. Energetic performances of Steven Copes, violin, and Maiya Papach, Viola carried Tsontakis’ intentions with assurance. They seemed very collaborative and in sync with each other. At times, they had an almost uncanny ability to sound like an entire quartet, perhaps enhanced by the general liveliness of Pickman Hall. The following movement, “With Hushed Tenderness,” started with a wonderful conversation between violin and viola, a leading melody, followed by and answer, then sections where they doubled each other. The movement sometimes felt directionless as it moved along. For the final movement, “Bumpkinesque,” he returned to the Philip Glass-like harmonies in a highly rhythmic, dance-like, crisp performance. Ultimately, the piece was interesting, thought-provoking, accessible, certainly worthy of attention. I’d like to hear it again.
Matt TempleFine Arts Reviews
read moreThe rest of the program was sheer delight. Violinist Steven Copes and pianist Shai Wosner gave an electric, sometimes impish performance of Igor Stravinsky's Divertimento from 'The Fairy's Kiss,'a stripped-down version of ballet music drawn from Tchaikovsky. In the violin and piano arrangement, Stravinsky's own orchestration of Tchaikovsky's material is reduced to its essentials, lean textures skipping on lively rhythms, and Copes and Wosner made a fun, vividly colored story of it.
James McQuillenThe Oregonian'A young artist whose playing was outstanding, technically, tonally, and stylistically.'
The StradSteven Copes interpreted Bach's a minor Sonata with an extraordinarily noble tone. He played seriously- in the best sense. With him, one feels that the music is simply in good hands.
Hannoversche Allgemeine ZeitungThe Bartok Second Concerto was delivered by the American, Steven Copes, with flashing, often exhilarating vigour and a real sense of how the whole piece works and unfolds, not just its dazzling effects and grateful passages.
Financial Times, LondonThey probably didn't expect to be wowed by the other piece on the program, Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla's "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires," given an adrenalin rush of a performance by violinist Steven Copes and the SPCO strings. But wowed they were, judging from the first 11 a.m. standing ovation in this regular concertgoer's memory. While the Vivaldi was also well played, the main event was upstaged by a work that drew upon it for inspiration. Actually, that wasn't what Piazzolla had in mind when he wrote "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires." They were composed as separate pieces, each capturing the bustle, hum and dance rhythms of that Argentine port city. But Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged them into little violin concertos that drop in some of Vivaldi's themes as musical signposts. On Friday morning, the SPCO's concertmaster, Steven Copes, proved an electrifying soloist, unleashing breathtaking fire upon "Summer," becoming a bow-wielding percussionist on "Autumn" and "Spring" and making "Winter" a sweet, sad torch song with a singing melody. Throw in the fact that the whole SPCO string section was exceptional on the piece, and it set the Vivaldi up to be anticlimactic. And that's too bad, because violinist Ruggero Allifranchini played it quite well. It made for an enjoyable performance, but it didn't raise goose bumps like the Piazzolla.
Rob HubbardPioneer PressClearly unwilling to squander a visit to New York by performing as a backing band, the orchestra also played a short preconcert program devoted to Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony in F (Op. 73a, actually Rudolf Barshai's 1990 orchestration of the Third String Quartet). The arrangement works brilliantly. The passion of Shostakovich's 1946 meditation on World War II is magnified not only by the heftiness of the string textures but also by the broadened palette afforded by the winds and harp. The orchestra, led by its concertmaster, Steven Copes, produced a wonderfully focused, opulent sound.
Allan KozinnNew York TimesIn one sense, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is venturing into uncharted territory this weekend with a program of works that have never been performed by this band.
But from an audience perspective, it's far from an uncharted voyage. Most of the program is very well-known: Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" and Schumann's Symphony No. 4. The centerpiece, Kurt Weill's Concerto for Violin and Winds, is less familiar, though it was presented just last spring by the Minnesota Orchestra with concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis as the soloist.
The concerto has an utterly different impact in this outing, which features concertmaster Steven Copes. Whereas the Minnesota Orchestra's presentation had a frenzied, explosive quality, the SPCO's performance is more refined and shaped — though it is still an exciting piece that involves wind instruments carrying knotty thematic passages while the soloist turns in a frequently dazzling display of spiky runs and double-stop figurations.
Weill wrote the concerto when he was just 24 and heavily under the influence of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. It displays a brilliant use of wind instruments and, especially in the SPCO's reading, a melding between soloist and ensemble that is muscular, vivid and complex. Weill might have considered "elegant" as a pejorative word, but that is the soaring quality of Copes' playing, along with the compelling sense that he's taking the listener somewhere.
David HawleyPioneer PressThe highlight of the concert was concertmaster Steven Copes' performance of the Violin Concerto by Kurt Weill. The work demanded the full range of violin technique, from heartfelt emotion to extreme technical proficiency. Copes performed it all like the virtuoso that he is.
Under Boyd's leadership, the SPCO played the acerbic score with gusto, not softening any of the harsh edges and more importantly, providing an aural framework to showcase Copes' stunning performance.
William Randall BeardStar TribuneThe Overture to Richard Strauss' final opera, "Capriccio," is a string sextet being performed for the opera's characters in the setting of an elegant salon. The chamber ensemble Accordo opened their third season with it on Monday evening, in their new home at Christ Church Lutheran in south Minneapolis. The setting might not be as plush as a salon, but it was certainly acoustically resplendent.
The clean, mid-century modernist architecture, by esteemed Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, is on the National Historic Registry. The striking blending of light brick and blonde wood projects a bright sound of ringing clarity, but with enough reverberation to perfectly complement Strauss' grand Romantic score.
The quintet is made up of St. Paul Chamber Orchestra violinists Steven Copes and Ruggero Allifranchini, violist Maiya Papach and cellist Ronald Thomas, along with Minnesota Orchestra cellist Anthony Ross and guest artist Minnesota Orchestra violist Rebecca Albers. The six instrumentalists produced a rich, resonant sound, but were also capable of moments of refined delicacy.
The centerpiece of the program was Arnold Schoenberg's tone poem "Verklärte Nacht" ("Transfigured Night"). This late Romantic composition came before his conversion to 12-tone music.
Written in 1899, this is Schoenberg's Opus 4, a work of his youth. The poem on which it's based, by Richard Dahmer, is also a work of youthful sentimentality. In the first part, a woman confesses that the child she's carrying is not her lover's. In the second, he forgives her, and the night is transfigured. Though Schoenberg later disparaged the work's programmatic associations, the tone poem is very clear in its drama. Albers' viola gave plaintive voice to the woman's grief. And Copes effectively conveyed the transformative power of the lover's absolution. The intense melodies and complex chromatic harmonies created a passionate piece of musical storytelling.
The concert concluded with a rousing rendition of Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence." The title comes from the fact that he wrote one of the principal themes while visiting Italy, but the work is distinctly Russian-sounding in its use of folk melodies. Allifranchini took full advantage of the lead violin part.
William Randall BeardStar Tribune
read moreConductor Boyd, who has made a splash heading the Manchester Camerata, projected the sublime beauty of Mozart's slow movements and, with excellent contributions from Pedja Muzijevic (piano) and Steven Copes (violin), led an arresting account of the Berg (Chamber Concerto), although the first movement, with its Viennese waltz, might have had more playfulness.
George LoomisFinancial TimesA Partita by Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski was commissioned by the SPCO for the Ordway's opening in January of 1985. Music director Pinchas Zukerman was the soloist then, a role assumed this weekend by the orchestra's concertmaster, Steven Copes. His deeply involving performance Friday morning reached its peak in the emotional middle movement, when his increasingly urgent high notes sounded like a cry above the martial fray of the orchestra.
Rob HubbardPioneer PressThe Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the baton of Thomas Ades created a magnificent performance on the fourth night of the Edinburgh International Festival.
In contrast to Ades' meticulous interpretation of Beethoven's Namensfeier overture, his baton wavered in the second piece of the program. Guiding the orchestra through the contrasting changes of character in Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, Ades' overall control and interpretation of tempi was not as strong as one would expect. Faltering slightly in the last Allegro entry before the Gavotta con due variazioni, the orchestra recovered quickly in response to Ades' assertive baton with a dazzling solo from leader Steven Copes.
Mary RobbMusicalCriticism.com.. the musicians sank their teeth into this program as if voraciously hungry for the kind of emotional release afforded by Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann. None more so than concertmaster Steven Copes, the soloist for the Brahms Violin Concerto. He attacked the work with a passion and intensity rarely seen from a musician who more often comes off as a humble team player.
Whether shredding his bow hairs on the cadenza of the opening movement or tugging heartstrings on the slow Adagio, Copes was electrifying yet technically impeccable. Chalk it up to the fact that the SPCO had never performed this Romantic masterwork in the orchestra's 50-year history, but there was an atmosphere of seizing the opportunity that seemed to fuel this interpretation.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press In a fully Romantic program of Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn, SPCO's own players show their virtuosity. Copes proved his mettle in the Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77 by Johannes Brahms. He conducted economically, with minimal hand gestures and often no more than a tilt of the head or a raised eyebrow, but he had a clear sense of the shape and structure of this monumental Romantic work. He was able to maintain his split focus without sacrificing any measure of his solo virtuosity and while maintaining a sure hand with the ensemble. As soloist, Copes demonstrated himself the master of the grand gesture, from the bravura cadenza in the opening Allegro to the lyrical meditation in the Andante. He clearly felt the music very deeply, and the solo performance was deeply affecting.
The concert opened with Robert Schumann's Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op. 52. This brief three-movement work built from the sprightly, lyrical Overture to a lively and dramatic Finale. Copes clearly had a good time with the piece, leading an energetic, fast-paced performance that sacrificed nothing in terms of orchestral cohesion and balance.
William Randall BeardStar TribuneThe program ended with a dashing performance of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2. The music's mix of tart lyricism and incendiary bravura took splendidly to the suave brilliance and brawny attack of Steven Copes, the orchestra's proficient concertmaster.
John von RheinChicago Tribune...the star of the show may have been the orchestra's concertmaster, Steven Copes, who delivered several thrilling violin solos on the concert's five other works. It was a briskly paced and utterly enjoyable program, full of reminders that the SPCO is a first-rate baroque band.
Or, in this case, a top-notch string section. For most of the concert, harpsichordist Layton James was the only one without a bow in his hand, and he and the cellists were alone in employing chairs. That increased the physicality factor, as the standing, conductor-less musicians cued one another with twists, dipped shoulders, nods and glances.
Allifranchini set an energetic tone on the Torelli concerto, stomping and swaying like a folk fiddler, and Copes soon followed suit on a Charles Avison Concerto Grosso. But Copes' strongest solos came on a set of 23 variations by Francesco Geminiani. All of the composers
represented were also violinists, and it's clear that they felt it in their best interests to write showpieces for that instrument.
Rob HubbardPioneer PressThe rapid about-face in the fortunes of chamber group Accordo reminds me of the final scene in the film "It's a Wonderful Life." Just as Jimmy Stewart's character, George Bailey, was in a dark and desperate place, only to be overwhelmed by the affection and generosity of the people of Bedford Falls, so has Accordo found its basket overflowing.
After a financial crisis at its home hall, the Southern Theater, left it homeless, this talented quintet of string players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra likely saw dark days ahead. But then offers of help started pouring in: The Schubert Club wanted to present their concerts. And Northrop Auditorium's concerts and lectures department. And the Southern's onetime music maven, Kate Nordstrum, now with the SPCO.
And maybe most important of all: Minneapolis' Christ Church Lutheran, which asked if the group wanted to perform its concerts there. All of this good fortune came together Monday night for the opening of the group's three-concert spring season.
And a wonderful one it was, a performance bursting with electricity and urgency. Performing three works for string sextet, Accordo produced something far more intense and exciting than most would imagine chamber music could be.
Opening with the overture from Richard Strauss' last opera, "Capriccio," the sextet established a tone of romance and passion that held throughout the evening. Paradoxical tones of sadness and transcendence emerged on the
Strauss, and violinist Steven Copes and cellist Anthony Ross let the passion pour forth.
But the performance by which this concert will be remembered was an intense and emotionally evocative interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," in its original six-musician incarnation. In Accordo's hands, it became an inspiring journey from dark despair to shimmering triumph, full of drama and musicianship both precise and powerful. No operatic aria could convey such a sense of desperate longing.
And the concluding performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" also reached a fever pitch of swoon-ready romanticism, the six musicians pouring their hearts into the interpretation.
And the 300-plus-seat Christ Church Lutheran proved acoustically impressive, with nary a trace of echo from the 35-foot-tall brick walls that surrounded the musicians. It seems a fine home for chamber music.
Rob HubbardPioneer Press
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