Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Princeton Symphony Orchestra

From Out of the Wilderness to the Land of Plenty

Holy smokes! Now that the holiday “routine” is finally winding down (getting ahead on my radio shows, visiting and hosting family, and generally being festive to the point I have no idea what day of the week it is), I glance at the calendar and realize that I’ve totally, inadvertently crammed next weekend with concerts. And somehow two of those concerts feature the Barber Violin Concerto – on the same day!

How did it happen? I impulsively acquired a seat to Friday afternoon’s Philadelphia Orchestra concert as part of a package deal for deeply-discounted tickets. Of course, I leaped at those programs that really appealed to me, the ones I regarded as must-see (or hear), and then to fill the quota, I picked the Friday concert.

And what’s not to like? The program includes, beside the lovely and moving Barber concerto (with the excellent Augustin Hadelich as soloist), Mahler’s winning Symphony No. 4, and John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” (John Adams for people who think they don’t like John Adams). Furthermore, Dalia Stasevska will be conducting, and I confess I am a little bit in love with her. (The fact that she’s married to Sibelius’ great-grandson further endears her to me.)

What I had forgotten was that I was already holding a ticket to the New Jersey Symphony, which had also lured me at some point with a 50-percent off sale. So I’ll be hearing the Barber concerto again on Friday night in Princeton, this time with Randall Goosby as the soloist. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, especially with a program that opens with Sibelius’ “Finlandia” and concludes with my personal favorite of the Tchaikovsky symphonies, the Symphony No. 2.

This Second Symphony, which assimilates Ukrainian folk themes, has always been subtitled, in English-speaking countries anyway, as the “Little Russian,” but world events have precipitated a shift toward identifying it as the “Ukrainian.” (I didn’t mention that Stasevska, who moved to Finland with her family at the age of 5, was born in Kyiv – yet another detail that binds the Friday concerts.) In this instance, the NJS’s music director, Xian Zhang, will conduct at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium.

Then on Saturday evening, I’ll be back at Richardson for a concert of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. Yet another violinist, Bella Hristova, will be the soloist for Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1. On the second half will be the Symphony No. 1 of Dmitri Shostakovich.

The program will open with a recent work by Portuguese composer Andreia Pinto Carreia. “Ciprés” takes its inspiration from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. The structure of the piece is said to be influenced by the poem’s imagery of trees and water. I’ll be interested to see (and hear) what that’s all about. PSO music director Rossen Milanov will conduct.

I’ll give my ears a rest on Sunday. I’m certainly not complaining – it will be great to get back to attending concerts – but you’ll understand, I hope, that it is a bit like emerging from the desert and trying not to drink too fast!

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PHOTO: Dalia Stasevska in her Chuck Taylors. She’ll remain in Philadelphia to oversee John Williams’ Tuba Concerto, with the orchestra’s principal tubist Carol Jantsch, January 15-17. You know I’ll be there for that too!

January 4, 2026
Princeton Symphony Orchestra Around the World

An overture about an Italian soubrette in Algiers, a symphony by a German composer in Italy, and a Russian concerto that had its first performance in New York City. It’s a small world on the next concerts of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, as composers find inspiration and support from beyond the borders of their native lands.

Maxim Lando will be the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s lesser-heard Piano Concerto No. 2, introduced in New York in 1881. The work was criticized by its dedicatee, Nikolai Rubinstein – granted, more diplomatically than he had Tchaikovsky’s evergreen Piano Concerto No. 1, which he had dismissed outright, before finally taking up its cause to the benefit of both music and performer. Be that as it may, Rubinstein died in Paris not long after his assessment of the 2nd, the longest and most lyrical of Tchaikovsky three keyboard concertos.

Also on the program will be Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 – known as the “Italian” – which had its origins in a European tour undertaken by the composer between 1829 and 1831. Mendelssohn was 21 years-old when he first arrived in Italy, and the experience threw him into ecstasies. He did his best to capture his ebullience in music. The symphony’s first performance in London in 1833, which Mendelssohn himself conducted, made him the most emulated composer in England for the remainder of the 19th century.

At first, Mendelssohn described it as “the jolliest work I have yet written.” However, despite its overwhelmingly positive reception (Ignaz Moscheles tells us the premiere was met with thunderous applause), the composer began to feel a nagging dissatisfaction with it. He revised the symphony in 1834, with plans for further changes, and the score was never published in his lifetime. He even claimed that it caused him some of the bitterest moments of his career. Naturally, it went on to become his most beloved symphony.

Rossini claimed that he wrote his opera “L’Italiana in Algieri” in 18 days. The plot is a mash-up of seria “rescue opera” and orientalist comedy, as an Italian woman shipwrecked off the coast of Algiers is captured and delivered to the Bey’s seraglio. The Bey wants to make her one of his wives, but she is a wily Rossini heroine, so of course she manages not only to outwit him but to spring her lover who happens also to have been enslaved. The manic intensity we often associate with the composer is evident in the overture, which will open this weekend’s concerts.

Rossen Milanov will conduct the program twice with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium. No passport necessary, this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 4:00 p.m.

For more information, visit princetonsymphony.org.

November 6, 2025
Oliverson’s Joyful Dvořák Shines

I wonder if it’s a truism that when violinist Aubree Oliverson is happy, she plays well. Because on the two occasions I’ve seen her, she’s exuded joy and played very well indeed. Last night, she followed her bliss in the Dvořák Violin Concerto on the first of two concerts presented this weekend by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.

Last year, I had a few quibbles about her take on the Tchaikovsky concerto, as I thought it lacked emotional depth, but I can’t deny that it was an exuberant performance. Just not sure that Tchaikovsky is always the most exuberant composer. Melancholy and angst don’t appear to be in Oliverson’s vocabulary. She takes the microphone before a performance and offers a brief, sunny anecdote about her first encounter with the work she’s about to play, and it’s evident from the first note that none of that giddy sense of discovery has waned. (Oliverson is still only in her 20s.) But perhaps in my 50s, I err too far in the other direction.

Dvořák seems to be a better fit for her. For sure, there is plenty of drama and wistfulness in the piece, but also lots of cheer and abundant charm in its Czech-inflected melodies and rhythms. Performer and music were as one in the buoyant final movement. I wish all good things for Oliverson. At her age, I was already a bitter fellow (though not at the expense of heart and humor).

Even in her encore, Olivia Marckx’s arrangement of Joseph Kosma’s melancholy standard, “Autumn Leaves,” there was little sense of heartbreak and instead a lot of jazzy playfulness.

Here’s an Oliverson performance compilation I found on YouTube. You can get a taste of her Dvořák as it’s the third selection. Her playing sells itself. In person, she is a ball of positive energy.

The second half of the program was devoted to Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestration of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor. The work is more fun if you’re familiar with the Brahms in its original incarnation (which the PSO presented on a chamber music concert on Thursday night). Schoenberg’s impression of Brahms is a bit like Rich Little’s impressions of most people who aren’t George Burns – you chuckle more because you recognize who they’re supposed to be than for their uncanny accuracy.

But in Schoenberg’s case, I’m not sure that’s even entirely the point. Schoenberg complained once in a letter to critic Alfred Frankenstein that the quartet is “always very badly played,” with the piano frequently overwhelming the strings. (That was not the case on Thursday night.) “I wanted to hear everything – and this I achieved.” So you say, Arnie. But there are times in Schoenberg’s orchestrations of other composers’ music, and not just here, that everything just turns to clotted cream.

The work is at its most pleasing when it emulates Brahms’ style. I was grateful for the sense of spaciousness achieved in the outer sections of the third movement, for instance, when the strings are allowed to breathe and the woodwinds offer touches of expressive color. At other times, it’s like washing down buttermilk with bock. There were passages when the textures became so claggy that I found myself longing for one of Schoenberg’s auditorium-clearing twelve-tone masterpieces that are at least held on a tighter leash, compellingly-argued at a fraction of the length.

Furthermore, there is a tendency in parts for his work here to slide into vulgarization. In Schoenberg’s arrangement, the march that emerges from the third movement is not inspiring, as it is in Brahms’ original, but crass, I suppose the way many marches are when played by ceremonial bands. Brahms’ music can be earthy on occasion, but he is never vulgar, not even when incorporating drinking songs into his “Academic Festival Overture.”

On the other hand, at those moments when Schoenberg really swings for the fences and brings in xylophones and glockenspiels, so that the ersatz gypsy czardases of the work’s final movement take on an almost cartoonish quality, it zings to life. As with Stokowski’s Bach, there’s an undeniable thrill in anticipating how garish and bizarre it will all become.

Of course, all matters of questionable Schoenbergian taste aside, the orchestra played marvelously, under Rossen Milanov’s assured direction. Milanov has been music director of the PSO since 2009.

The concert opened with a brief but attractive work by Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova, “Orpheus’ Comet.” Suggesting the form of a toccata and unfolding in a swirl of orchestral bees (in Virgil’s “Georgics,” Eurydice is pursued by a bee-keeper, prior to the fatal snake-bite that sends her to the underworld), the work is sensitively orchestrated and full of interesting colors. It culminates in a quotation of Monteverdi’s famous fanfare from his opera “L’Orfeo.” Even without the stunt payoff, the piece is a lot of fun, and at five minutes it does not outstay its welcome. Tabakova clearly understands what Schoenberg did not – that brevity is the soul of wit.

These are just a few of my impressions. You should hear my George Burns. (Say goodnight, Gracie.) You’ll have a chance to draw your own conclusions when the program is repeated at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium this afternoon at 4:00. For more information, visit princetonsymphony.org.

October 26, 2025
Princeton Symphony Brahms & Schoenberg

To open its 2025-26 season, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra is offering a rare opportunity to experience an established masterpiece from two very different perspectives.

Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor of 1861 was orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg in 1937. Brahms was 28 when he wrote it. At the time of its transmogrification, Schoenberg was 63.

Despite his notorious reputation as the godfather of dodecaphonic music, Schoenberg greatly admired Brahms and indeed would celebrate him, emphasizing his underappreciated genius as a musical adventurer, in a series of 1947 talks titled “Brahms the Progressive.”

Schoenberg’s reimagining of the piano quartet is warm and affectionate. For most of the work, he manages a pretty good Brahms impression, if not a slavish one. It’s hard to imagine Brahms ladling on the percussion quite like that in the “gypsy rondo” finale. Furthermore, perhaps disorientingly, there is no piano in it. So it’s not Brahms, exactly, but it IS entertaining. Otto Klemperer, who conducted the premiere of the hybrid in Los Angeles, on Brahms’s birthday anniversary, May 7, 1938, paid tribute to Schoenberg’s accomplishment. “You can’t even hear the quartet,” he declared, “so beautiful is the orchestration.”

Brahms-Schoenberg will make up the second half of this weekend’s Princeton Symphony Orchestra concerts. The program will also include Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Aubree Oliverson, who charmed audiences last year with her performances of the Tchaikovsky concerto. The concerts will open with “Orpheus’ Comet” by Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova.

To get the Brahms fresh in our ears and enhance our appreciation of Schoenberg’s achievement, the PSO will present Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in its original guise on Thursday night, with PSO favorite Natasha Paremski, along with violinist Marc Uys, violist Xandi van Dijk, and cellist John-Henry Crawford. The concert will include commentary by PSO music director Rossen Milanov – who, of course, will also conduct the weekend concerts.

Brahms’ chamber work will be performed at Trinity Church Princeton, 33 Mercer St., on Thursday at 7 p.m.

The orchestral program will be presented at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.

At another related event, storyteller Maria LoBiondo will refresh our memories of the Orpheus myth, in preparation for our brush with “Orpheus’ Comet,” as she weaves her spell at Princeton Public Library, this Wednesday at 7 p.m. Attendees will have the opportunity to enter a drawing to win free tickets for this weekend’s concerts.

Don’t look back with regret like Orpheus. For more information, visit princetonsymphony.org.

October 21, 2025
The Princeton Festival’s “Tosca” Takes Flight

Once you see “Tosca,” you never forget it. But I never expected to be haunted by it!

I remember the first time I saw it on PBS back in the 1980s. It was one of those “Great Performances” broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera, with Hildegard Behrens in the title role and Cornell MacNeil as the villainous Scarpia. Placido Domingo was Cavaradossi. From the perspective of my 19-year-old self, Domingo, especially, seemed a little long in the tooth to be cutting the romantic figure of a dashing young painter turned political prisoner. Funny to think back on it now, as he must have only been in his 40s at the time. And he’s still singing!

Now, 40 years on, what a difference it makes to experience the work with someone with the pipes AND the youth to really put it across. Last night at The Princeton Festival, tenor Victor Starsky sang Cavaradossi with power and vigor. In fact, all three leads, including soprano Toni Marie Palmertree as Tosca and baritone Luis Ledesma as Scarpia, were extraordinarily well-matched, at every turn heightening the drama and intensifying the passion, in what is really a lean chamber piece writ large by Giacomo Puccini. Frankly, I never recognized its genius before.

Never had I found myself so engrossed in the work’s interweaving themes, both musical (the interplay of heart-rending leitmotifs clearly paving the way for Hollywood film scores of the 1930s & ’40s) and textual (the libretto a fascinating blend of religion, politics, and sexuality). It really got me thinking about how each of the characters relates to love, death, and God in various combinations. And I thought “Tristan” was perverse in its celebration of love-death! Clearly, Wagner was not Italian.

It’s the kind of reflection one engages in when one experiences opera as theater, as opposed to listening to it on a recording, where the music and the quality of the singing take precedence. In the opera house, you get the total experience, as you’re also focusing on the action and the words.

“Tosca” really begins to insinuate itself as it explores various permutations of faith and blasphemy, eroticism and nihilism. Far from the laugh-out-loud experience of that PBS “Tosca” that had me howling in Act III, the opera, when done right, makes you forget how trashy the subject matter really is. It’s no longer the “shabby little shocker” derided by musicologist Joseph Kerman, but rather like Victor Hugo at his most twisted. You just don’t know how to feel about certain things, but you can’t help FEELING. Is there a more desolate aria than Cavaradossi’s “E lucevan le stelle?” Sometimes you’re just screwed. Interesting, though, that the character couches thoughts of impending doom in meditations on all the hot nights he’s going to be missing out on with Tosca. Molto Italiano!

Tosca’s thoughts, on the other hand, in her own expression of hopelessness, the aria “Vissi d’arte,” turn on contemplations as to why God has deserted her. For Scarpia, virile, dangerous, and subtle, well, he sings – in church no less – “Tosca, you make me forget God!” Because he’ll do anything to have her.

Ledesma not only has the voice, but the imposing carriage to convince as the morally bankrupt chief of police, who is the recipient of the opera’s most awe-inspiring leitmotif. He is an edifice in himself, the embodiment of power corrupted. We hear echoes of it, even as Tosca enacts a pious ritual with candles and crucifix over his corpse, as if to note, how the mighty have fallen.

Scarpia is no cartoon villain. He invokes Iago in the first act. Even in death, he dominates. It’s not for nothing that Tosca’s last line is “I’ll see you before God, Scarpia!” The full extent of his calculated evil comes to light only posthumously, and he looms over the fates of the other characters, just as the grim prison of the Castel Sant’Angelo looms over Rome.

For such a swift opera (Puccini was ruthless in trimming numbers from the libretto, based on a sprawling melodrama conceived by Victorien Sardou as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt), the characters are fascinatingly layered. Some contemporaries complained about the resulting sacrifice of lyricism (alleged), but the drama is inexorable. Since there are no set pieces or flashy effects (beyond perhaps that chorus at the end of Act I), it’s essential that all the singers be able to pull their weight, vocally and as actors.

The opera certainly offers a plum part for a soprano – a diva playing a diva – and Palmertree left nothing on the table. Like Starsky, she brought it when it counted. Tosca’s journey takes her from the comparative innocence of love, religious devotion, and petty jealousy in Act I to desperation and resourcefulness, as she pushes back against Scarpia’s objectification and harassment in Act II, to the point that she takes matters into her own hands. Palmertree made you feel the anguish of Tosca trying to keep her lover’s secret, even as she hears him being tortured in the next room, only to have to rein it in a few moments later to strike the right tone of introspection to navigate her dark night of the soul in “Vissi d’arte.”

The Princeton Symphony Orchestra was in impressive tune with its conductor, Rossen Milanov, who led the performance as to the manner born. Milanov has ample experience conducting opera and ballet in the U.S. and Europe, but it’s only comparatively recently that we’ve been exposed to that facet of his artistry in Princeton. Nothing I’ve heard at the Princeton Festival since its post-COVID resurrection in 2022 prepared me for what I heard and saw last night. Milanov conjured waves of sound and navigated passionate breakers, but he did so most undemonstratively, as a collaborator, yes, but also as a sensitive accompanist. Conducting opera is like steering a ship, and no matter how turbulent the drama got, Milanov at the helm kept his cool and rode the blue. I don’t know if it’s just that I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but even when conducting the orchestra’s regular subscription concerts at Richardson Auditorium, he really does seem to be more relaxed and just getting better all the time.

Also, not to be undersold was the production’s stage direction by Eve Summer. Even though I emphasize “Tosca’s” intimacy, the opera would seem to call for grand sets, at least for the outer acts. How do you believably conjure the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle on a stage the size of the one inside the performance pavilion on the grounds of Morven Museum & Garden? And how on earth do you hope to convey the height and imposing grandeur of the Castel Sant’Angelo, and still have room for a firing squad, much less to pull off the opera’s famous ending. Yet Summer and scenic designer Ryan McGettigan made it work. A masterstroke came at the end of the first act, when the chorus (prepared by Vinroy Brown), attired in cowls and miters, processed from the stage up and down the aisles of the tent to surround the audience with spinetingling sonorities.

Furthermore, I must say, I expected something far less spectacular from Tosca’s final act of defiance. Instead of simply dropping from the parapet, as I anticipated, Palmertree suddenly put on a burst of speed, dashing along the length of the battlement, at the far end flinging herself headlong into oblivion. Kudos for going for broke! I am nearly always slammed by a wave of emotion at the end of an opera, but the music, the visual, and the audience reaction really put it over the top.

I admit, when I first heard that the opera this summer was going to be “Tosca,” I had my doubts. Previously, the post-COVID, Princeton Symphony Orchestra incarnation of the Princeton Festival had dealt solely in comedy – “The Barber of Seville,” “Albert Herring,” “Cosi fan tutte,” “The Impresario” and “Scalia/Ginsburg” – certainly apt, given the season and the venue. These all had their enjoyments, but I was unprepared for “Tosca,” which despite the stage limitations, was a triumph.

Anything else this week is bound to seem anticlimactic, but there’s something to be said for just relaxing and enjoying a concert. The Princeton Festival runs through Saturday. For the remainder of this year’s schedule, visit https://www.princetonsymphony.org/festival.

June 18, 2025

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