The Palo Alto Philharmonic is not an ordinary nonprofessional community orchestra. It regularly gives the first performances of major new compositions by a talented composer of worthwhile music.
That composer, Lee Actor, has been designated the orchestra’s composer-in-residence. He is also the assistant conductor and a member of the ensemble, playing viola and percussion.
The Philharmonic’s latest concert, last Saturday, April 6, presented the first performance of Actor’s newly-composed Symphony No. 4. The orchestra has also played all of the previous three, plus several of Actor’s concertos and other works. Its usual venue of the Cubberley Theatre being unavailable due to remodeling, the concert was held at the Visual and Performing Arts Center of De Anza College in Cupertino, an equally small auditorium with less overwhelming acoustics. Actor conducted his own symphony; the rest of the concert was led by Music Director Lara Webber.
Actor’s Symphony No. 4 is a hefty and serious work in four movements, half an hour in length. His previous symphony, No. 3, reminded me often of the work of Dmitri Shostakovich. This one has less of that reminiscence but it speaks the same musical language. Listeners who like Shostakovich symphonies will probably enjoy this one.
Inevitably, the listener will hear passages that are reminiscent of other composers. This does not mean Actor is imitative in his style, for he is not. It’s just a characteristic of the idiom, as an author may have turns of phrase that are reminiscent of the wording of earlier authors, to have momentary resemblances. I found bits in the cellos that evoked Sergei Rachmaninoff, or in the winds that gave a whiff of Carl Nielsen, as well as one big Shostakovich similarity, in the viola theme and techniques of string layering in the slow movement. These are all good composers to resemble if one wishes to write in an accessible modern-style.
The composer acknowledges one obvious homage: His symphony begins just as many of Anton Bruckner’s do, with a solo horn theme over shimmering strings. But the horn theme itself is not like Bruckner’s at all. The resemblance, like the others, quickly dissipates. This opening movement is a questing prelude that repeatedly builds up to tentative climaxes and returns to the opening music. The following scherzo does something of the same, while emphasizing slower and more lyrical wind lines over the more complex string parts, a technique that reappears in the slow movement.
Actor has distinctive ways of putting the heft into his music. Where Bruckner would use repeating string figurations to build up to a climax, Actor prefers to use them to maintain drive and intensity. He also uses steady beats on the timpani to the same end. Where Actor likes to surprise the listener is by transmuting his string figures into dance rhythms: once a waltz, once a sort of Spanish tango.
That made for a piece that was occasionally fun as well as serious and engrossing. Actor has substantial things he wants to say in musical form and he has a winning and appealing way of saying them. The orchestra did impressively well in some of the more complex and necessarily unfamiliar passages, only occasionally failing to maintain a professional-level sound.
Webber paired Actor’s symphony with “En Saga,” the first tone poem by Jean Sibelius. Like Actor’s first movement, it is built of many tentative climaxes which die away and then start over. It also has a tentative beginning, in this case of strange and ghostly music that goes on for nearly a quarter of the 20-minute piece before finally something that sounds like Sibelius shows up in the form of two catchy melodies for strings, the first of which is, like Actor’s slow movement theme, given to the violas to play.
As with the Actor, the orchestra managed well with this strange and difficult music. The musicians were particularly successful with the remaining piece on the program, the “Roman Carnival Overture” by Hector Berlioz. The composer threw this together as a potpourri of tunes from his Italian-inspired opera “Benvenuto Cellini.” Webber and the orchestra took better care to keep the result coherent and united than the composer did.
Palo Alto Philharmonic’s next performance is a Sunday afternoon family concert May 19, scheduled for the Cubberley Theatre, featuring music inspired by birds: Rossini’s “Thieving Magpie” Overture, Stravinsky’s suite from “The Firebird,” and plenty more.
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