Rossini, Ravel, and Sibelius:  Elizabeth Stoyanovich, cond., Bremerton Symphony Orchestra, Bremerton Performing Arts Center, Bremerton, WA, 07.10.2006 (BJ)

 

 

The Bremerton Symphony continues to astonish. Here, in a relatively small and predominantly blue-collar town, is an amateur orchestra that was, by all accounts, going through a pretty bad patch a few years ago; but in just her fourth season as music director, Elizabeth Stoyanovich has raised it to a standard capable, on this occasion, of offering almost unalloyed pleasure in the Barber of Seville overture, Ravel’s Boléro, and Sibelius’s Second Symphony.

At the end of last season, when I reviewed the orchestra’s performances of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola and Orff’s Carmina Burana, what surprised me perhaps more than anything else was the quality of the string playing, always a challenge for amateur forces. This time there was a shade less polish in that department, but that is to be expected in the season’s first concert, before the players have a chance to accustom themselves afresh to playing together. Nevertheless, the strings’ achievement (including Michael Burkland’s neatly turned little cello solo in the trio section of Sibelius’s third movement) was still well above average, and it shared the limelight with accomplished woodwind playing, crisp percussion, and some remarkably strong and well-tuned contributions from the brass section.

The Rossini was delivered with plenty of spirit, and, as for Boléro, I have heard conductors of world renown control the pacing of the music far less well than Stoyanovich did in her admirably steady yet sufficiently nuanced reading. It was in the Sibelius, naturally enough, that the excellence of the brass choir was most strikingly apparent. Again, this was a performance that blended solid execution with considerable musical acumen. I found the first movement at times a touch short of forward momentum, and there were one or two passages later on that missed their full potential: in the slow movement, the mysterious soft sections with divided string parts were not balanced well enough to allow the melody to come through clearly, and in the finale the repetitions of the subordinate theme leading up to the peroration might also have benefited from a little more urgency of pulse. But these were minor disappointments in an interpretation that was both thoughtful and thrillingly dramatic–and that final brass-dominated apotheosis of the finale’s main theme was delivered with such conviction and such richly burnished sonority that the audience went home obviously delighted with Sibelius, with Bremerton, and with Ms. Stoyanovich and her dedicated players.

 

 

Bernard Jacobson