Fall Colors

A fascinating Russian violinist, very much alive at 28, and a dead Russian composer who refuses to roll over at 174 dominated Friday’s Lansing Symphony opener.

The ursine show of force moved me to climb into a virtual T-90 tank, point it westward and shred the sublime verse of Joni Mitchell: “I’ve looked at Slavs from both sides now/alive and dead, and still somehow/their brooding power holds me in thrall/I just can´t shake that Russian pall/at all.”

Max Bruch’s autumnal violin concerto was perfectly timed for the September nip in the air. Soloist Yevgeny Kutik infused every note, no matter how fleeting, with its own color and character, elevating Bruch’s music from merely pleasing to unforgettable.

Gusts from the orchestra kicked up clusters of notes that slowly fell to the ground like spent leaves. In Kutik’s hands, each leaf curled and danced differently, some fluttering all the way down, others swaying to and fro, hovering in heartbreaking stasis before surrendering to gravity.

From the start, it seemed to dawn on everyone in the hall that a master was at work. Many listeners leaned forward, mesmerized by the liquid, mercurial strands of melody that spiraled from his fiddle. Kutik had a way of working the virtuoso bits into the grain of the music, like patterns on birch bark, burnishing his tone with breathtaking beauty. Far from showing off, he seemed to float above himself, monitoring every move, deflecting attention from the effort required to achieve this miracle of sound.

He almost underplayed the concerto’s most famous bit, the joyous finale, but Kutik does nothing pro forma. His exultation was tinged with autumn tones, like a ray of light in the decaying forest. Maestro Timothy Muffitt and the orchestra backed him respectfully, surrounding him with a rich palette of ochres, browns and yellows, bringing this often-heard music into the soul of the listener as few performances do. Kutik’s choice for a solo encore, Maruice Ravel’s stark “Kaddish,” reflected the violinist’s serious cast of mind and dark family history. (His family fled anti-Semitic persecution in Belarus when he was 5 years old.) After the romantic filigree of Bruch, the choice of music inspired by the Jewish prayer for the dead seemed to declare, “OK, I´ve been your performing bear; this is what I really came to do.”

The melody, played without vibrato with steel-bar strength, seemed to bear the weight of the world. Muffitt gave the night’s big work, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s huge Fifth Symphony, all the space it needed — and it needs a lot. It’s to Muffitt’s credit that he doesn’t rush things along and pander to short attention spans, but this time, the deliberate pacing brought the music close to Pyotr-ing out a couple of times. There was a lot to enjoy, though, including a delicately played dance movement that conjured up the grand balls of Tolstoy novels. To really enjoy this symphony, you have be down with the ravaging onslaught of the recurring “fate” theme, and this dutiful performance didn’t convert me. The best thing about all of this Russian brooding was the chance to hear principal bassist Richard Fedewa and his dark legions rumble away at their ominous, outsize fiddles. All the low strings, cellos too, reached stupendous levels of ominosity. 

It was another night for warhorses, but Muffitt sent out one little bird of freshness to start the evening: A bright, pulsating four-minute excerpt from Michael Gandolfi’s “Garden of Cosmic Speculation.” The music consisted of a vigorous trampoline session on three or four repeating chords, spiced by jazzy solos from trombonist Ava Ordman and trumpeter Rich Illman and a sudden veer into glassy stillness, with a (recorded?) birdcall. Illman and Ordman took well-deserved bows, but the bird was too small to see from my row in the middle of the hall.”