On Friday evening, the Oakland East Bay Symphony presented a program of Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Brydern, led by music director Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theatre. I hadn't heard OEBS in a number of years and was excited by the vitality and polish of the performance.
The program opened with the world premiere of Double Identity by Benedikt Brydern. The piece was commissioned through the New Visions/ New Vistas project, which is supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation. Through the project, OEBS is commissioning four new works by California composers who have not yet written for or had a work performed by a professional orchestra. The four composers selected for participation come from a breadth of musical backgrounds, which include jazz, Afro-Cuban, soul, R&B, and electronic music. Brydern's Double Identity was a demonstrable success. The work is alive with the idioms of swing and bebop. It abounds with energy, a feature brought out by the orchestra's bubbly performance, impressive both for its life and for its cleanliness.
OEBS followed the premiere with an orchestral staple: Strauss's Don Quixote. The piece is a challenge to its listener, less linear in its narrative than others of Strauss's tone poems, and epic in length. The piece features a solo cellist, who embodies the character of Don Quixote. The cellist for this performance was OEBS principal Daniel Reiter, who delivered the formidable material with elegance and authority. Once again, I was delighted by the orchestra's nuance and wide palette of colors; it was a commanding performance which captured my imagination.
The crowning event in the evening was a performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, featuring Bay Area native Adam Neiman as soloist. The orchestra played with less energy and interest in the concerto, but Neiman's drive and attention to detail held the work together beautifully. I was particularly taken with the soloist's ability to find meaning and beauty in some of the moments in the piece which typically fail to draw the listener's attention; he played with sparkling freshness and true sensitivity throughout. Moreover, Neiman knocked his audience's socks off with his technical facility; his octave passages, of which there are many in the concerto, were unbelievable.
Next up for OEBS is its season finale: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and a 2002 work by Jake Heggie on May 14 and 16.
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