Rei Hotoda conducting
with Michael Sachs, trumpet
Feb. 22-23, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
reviewed from online stream, posted Feb. 28
Rei Hotoda, music director of California’s Fresno Philharmonic, booked on short notice as guest conductor of the Richmond Symphony’s latest mainstage program, led two musical mash-ups and one of the more elusive symphonies of the romantic era.
The mash-ups were Vivian Fung’s “Earworms” (2018), inspired by her then-4-year-old son’s listening (and re-listening) habits, and the Trumpet Concerto of Wynton Marsalis, the jazz master who has amassed a substantial catalog of classical orchestral and chamber works.
Both works are colorful, at times mosaic-like sequences of episodes. Themes pop up, then recede into the orchestral fabric. Fung peppers her piece with assorted quotations, from “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” to Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question” and Maurice Ravel’s “La valse.” In Marsalis’s six-movement concerto, the trumpet solos evoke vintage jazz and moody cabaret songs while the orchestration echoes Igor Stravinsky and other highbrow modernists.
Michael Sachs, principal trumpeter of the Cleveland Orchestra, introduced the concerto with the orchestra in 2023. His mastery of its technical challenges, logistical quick changes – alternating between two trumpets, using an assortment of mutes – and shifts of styles and moods were audible throughout this performance.
Sachs was especially impressive in the concerto’s two urban nocturnes, seeming reminiscences of mid-20th-century New York, that call for nuanced lyricism – not this instrument’s usual tone of voice.
Stylistic gears shifted radically in the second half of the program, devoted to Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major.
The Schumann Second is sometimes described as an audial realization of the composer’s psychological instability, physical maladies and contrasting personalities. Its mood swings between high energy and pained yearning. Its orchestration in fast sections, especially the scherzo, is intricate, at times jittery, its rhythms frequently syncopated. Its slow movement is among the most bittersweet in the romantic musical literature. Few symphonies are as tricky to organize and as challenging to convey continuity.
Hotoda and the orchestra scored well on organization – none of Schumann’s many voices and orchestral layers went unheard or out of balance – but came up short on expression. The performance was generally brisk and sounded rather dispassionate, more classical than romantic in tone.
This approach has become common in interpretations of Schumann, Mendelssohn and other early romantics. It pays dividends in clarity of details – especially beneficial in Schumann, whose orchestrations can sound dense and clotted; but it can leave the listener with a sense that emotional depths go unplumbed.