Victoria Symphony
- Tania Miller, conductor
- Jonathan Crow, violin soloist
- At the Royal Theatre in Victoria on Monday
To stand a violinist in front of an orchestra with his instrument is to initiate a whole series of expectations and hierarchical relationships – X versus Y, the one against the many, the individual who forms attachments, enters into dialogue, asserts power or skill, retreats from force, subverts, subsumes or integrates. Such is the nature of the concerto.
Rodney Sharman’s Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by Victoria Symphony and received its home debut with solo violinist Jonathan Crow on Monday night (the actual premiere was the previous night in Duncan, B.C.), must still, in the 21st century, acknowledge that metaphor-rich paradigm.
And indeed it does, although Sharman, who wrote the concerto in his last year as composer-in-residence for Victoria Symphony, has created a particularly unusual dynamic within the concerto by giving the timpanist (the excellent William Linwood, four mallets in hand) a prominent role. Bookended by Beethoven – the program opened with the melodramatic Overture to Coriolan, op. 62 and closed with a somewhat prosaic interpretation of Sixth Symphony, Pastorale – Sharman’s concerto alludes to the way Beethoven placed the spotlight on the timpani in the symphonies and in his violin concerto, but then takes it much further.
The piece is in two movements: An andante, which the composer describes as “primarily lyrical,” precedes a fast, perpetual-motion allegro that recalls some of the material from the slower movement. The andante is “lyrical” only in comparison to the fast movement, however, for the gestures issued and reissued by the solo violin line are wide-angled arpeggios, full of sevenths and ninths pinned at the bottom, often reinforced by multiple stops and constricted in their capacity for movement. It’s a hard-working and not especially ingratiating solo part, one that repeats (with constant variation) and circles back on itself.
It is a line that aspires to lyricism but rarely attains it, and it is only occasionally released to rise, with much poignancy, to the highest and purest harmonics. Alas, one of the most affecting moments was destroyed by the horrifically slow egress of a wailing, whining child in the balcony, although Crow, who is a wonderfully elegant and undemonstrative violinist, made magic of it nonetheless.
But as the concerto progressed we became increasingly aware of the timpani as a determining agent. Sometimes it cut in dramatically and aggressively; sometimes it hovered delicately over the proceedings, as if conducting from the wings. But more and more the timpanist took on the aspect of a puppeteer manipulating the complicated skeins of melody emanating from the violin. It’s a novel and jarring image for a concerto – one that suggests the soloist has only the appearance of control – and it’s certainly a provocative recasting of the traditional dynamic.
Sharman has made orchestra an unusually forceful presence as well, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes turbulent, other times a glittering cushion for the soloist or a brazen smear of glissandi. This was a pretty stern and possibly cynical piece of writing for Sharman, whose music is often so sensuous and unapologetically lovely. But it has a puzzling and indisputable strength, a strength that lingered in memory long after the last bucolic expanses of F major in Beethoven’s familiar Sixth faded away.
Special to The Globe and Mail
