“Platt led his orchestra with enthusiasm and great care so as to meld perfectly in interpretive unity. This will be the music director’s final season and he will be greatly missed.”

—Alan Becker, South Florida Classical Review; Boca Raton Symphonia, November 9, 2009

“Conductor Alexander Platt demonstrated why his soon-to-end tenure at the helm of the orchestra has been such a good one: Fresh, even risky programming, and committed performances….What Platt has created is another decent Mendelssohn symphony, more on the order of the Reformation rather than the Scottish or Italian Symphonies, yet clearly well worth doing, and he deserves great credit for thinking of it and for having the courage to try it. It adds a good early Romantic score to the repertoire of smaller orchestras, and allows some worthy music that would otherwise be overlooked to have new life.”

—Gregory Stepanich, PalmBeachArtsPaper.com, Boca Raton Symphonia, November 9, 2009

“Most of the excitement of “La Tragedie de Carmen”, was generated in the pit, where Alexander Platt made his small band cook, trading the lushness of a big string section for spare effects….”

—Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2009

PLATT, WAUKESHA SYMPHONY END SEASON WELL —“A low groaning of cellos and basses opens Rachmaninov’s Symphony No.2, which ended the Waukesha Symphony’s season Tuesday evening….Alexander Platt conducted with a great appreciation of the melodic ravishment of this music, and it was ravishing. But he heard more than that, so his players could deliver more and we could hear more. I started to say that he made us hear its architecture, but this epic work compares more properly to planetary forces. I heard in this very committed reading the slow, inevitable and logical movement of tectonic plates.”

—Tom Strini, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, May 20, 2009

“Peter Brook’s “La Tragedie de Carmen” is not your grandfather’s “Carmen”, nor, at several points, Bizet’s, for that matter. For the central production of its spring festival, Chicago Opera Theater is presenting Brook’s 1981 chamber re-casting of Bizet’s celebrated opera, which received a vivid, vocally impressive performance Sunday afternoon at the Harris Theater….Alexander Platt conducted the chamber ensemble with incisiveness and flexibility, bringing out the clever felicities of Constant’s re-scoring, and providing firm dramatic momentum, the opera unfolding in a seamless arc.”

—Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review, May 11, 2009

“Most of Bizet’s best-loved musical numbers are still there, tended to with verve and style by a crisp ensemble under resident conductor Alexander Platt….”

—John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, May 4, 2009

CHICAGO OPERA THEATER’S “CARMEN” MAKES BIZET LESS BUSY —“Those with a passion for the minimalist aesthetic will be enthralled by “La Tragedie de Carmen” — the cut-to-the-chase version of the Bizet classic now in a Chicago Opera Theater production at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance….As reworked by the 20th century Romanian composer Marius Constant, and adapted by the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and British director Peter Brook, this experiment in condensation and modernization, first produced in 1981, has a running time of just 80 minutes, a cast of seven characters, no chorus, no dancing, and a chamber orchestra under the fleet direction of Alexander Platt…”

—Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times, May 3, 2009

Artymiw, Shostakovich shine at Boca Symphonia—Area concertgoers haven’t had enough opportunities in the past 10 years or so to hear live performances hereabouts of the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, an important group of works whose best examples are likely to swell in stature as the years go by.

Now they can add another one to that small list, as Alexander Platt and the Boca Raton Symphonia gave a vivid, vigorous reading Sunday afternoon of the Russian composer’s Ninth Symphony (in E-flat, Op. 70), a short, chamber-style work exactly suited to the size and heft of the Symphonia. It could be argued that Platt’s programming of the piece, and his group’s fine execution of it, made a good case for smaller orchestras everywhere to add it to their usual stock of Mendelssohns, early Beethovens and Borodins.

Though the Ninth, written in 1945, doesn’t compare in size and force to works such as the Fifth or even the Tenth (which got a credible performance a couple years back from the Lynn University Philharmonia), the Ninth is still quite difficult, with virtuoso-style chops needed for the violins and woodwinds in particular. That they were up to the challenge was apparent from the beginning, with the flutes throwing out all the sparkle and wit of this side of Shostakovich, and with a remarkably good high-stepping moment from a solo horn.

Platt’s tempo was swift and strong in the first movement, and nicely paced in the slower second movement, which despite an unfortunate cracked high clarinet note in the first pages had the right kind of moodiness and tension that this music demands, with the strings especially poignant as they took up the melodic burden. The woodwinds and trumpeter Jeffrey Kaye stood out in the impish third movement, as did the rest of the brass in the short fanfares of the fourth.

Some fine solo bassoon work led evocatively into the fifth-movement finale, which Platt began at quite a slow tempo, giving him and the orchestra plenty of room to wind up to the dash and exhilaration of the symphony’s closing pages. This was a sharp, smart, muscular interpretation of this terrific piece, and putting it on the program as the closing work made an even better argument for it.

The first half of the concert, held at the Roberts Theater on the campus of St. Andrew’s School, featured the American pianist Lydia Artymiw in the Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C, K. 467) of Mozart. Nearly five minutes were spent on stage in seriocomic fashion before the work began as Kaye, a technician and finally Artymiw herself labored to fix a recalcitrant music stand on the piano. Fortunately, this glitch didn’t spoil the listening mood for the audience, which is good because a subtle, elegant performance of the concerto soon unfolded.

Artymiw has a large, pretty sound and the technique to go with it, and she also showed she has good taste. One of the special beauties of the opening movement is its frequent mixing of major and minor keys, and in the first such such solo example, Artymiw made the most of it, lingering just enough on it to give it a good measure of Mozartean poetry. That provided excellent contrast with the even strings of sixteenth notes had to spin out for the rest of the movement, and it also hinted where the famous Andante would go.

That movement was notable for the deeply sensitive accompaniment of the orchestra; on the second go-round of the main theme, the pulsing strings were almost inaudible, which made for a lovely effect and also allowed Artymiw full rein to stress the embellishments. In the finale, Artymiw played with a gentle sparkle, and the Symphonia was appropriately restrained until the final measures. It was an admirable partnership of a fine soloist and a sensitive orchestra, and both served Mozart well.

The program opened with another work in C major, the First Symphony of Beethoven (Op. 21). Despite the last-minute loss of one of the first violins, the string sound here was full and confident, and the Symphonia gave the Beethoven a rendition that was sinewy in the first and third movements and sweetly charming in the second, without being too precious.

The finale was businesslike and less pointedly jokey than some performances I’ve heard, and it worked successfully. This reading was a perfect example of how exactly suited orchestras of the Symphonia’s size are for Beethoven’s first symphonic essays, and what it cannot match in a full-size group in sheer power it redeems in the inner strength and clarity with which it presents the music.

The most important aspect of this group’s work is its fresh programming, and the fifth-season brochure that was available Sunday promised more of the same next season, including a performance of the Capricorn Concerto of Samuel Barber and the Violin Concerto of Ned Rorem. Concertgoers by now should confidently expect that these works will be presented with respect and thorough preparation, and a larger eye toward expanding the repertory in general. www.bocasymphonia.org.

—By Greg Stepanich

Rousing Performance—Mendelssohn, Ravel, Larsen and Tchaikovsky in South Florida—The Boca Raton Symphonia is doing some of the most arresting programming in South Florida. Principal conductor and artistic advisor Alexander Platt imaginatively combines rarely heard scores with emotionally compelling contemporary pieces and a smattering of more familiar repertoire. Platt, a discerning interpreter of wide ranging musical vistas, was in great form on 8 February 2009 as he led the ensemble (now in its fourth season) in a typically eclectic program in the Roberts Theater at Saint Andrew’s School in Boca Raton, Florida, USA .

Platt’s clearly delineated, precise baton technique drew strongly accented, adept performances from his highly polished chamber orchestra. Opening with a vigorous, tautly gauged performance of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Platt was equally at home in the lyrical impressionism of Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte (‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’)—a gossamer performance that cast its hypnotic spell.

Minnesota-based composer Libby Larsen conceived her setting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1993 for the illustrious American soprano Arlene Auger. Like Peter Lieberson’s recent Neruda Songs, Larsen’s six song cycle revels in sensuous orchestral colors, strings and harp painting evocative backdrops to the often high lying vocal arioso. The score begins with the ringing of chimes as prelude to I thought once how Theocritus had sung, as the writer anticipates death. At the conclusion of the final setting How do I love thee? chimes again ring out as the singer intones the final line ‘I shall but love thee better after death’. Larsen effectively mirrors Browning’s volatile moods (and sense of doubt) with jittery orchestral figurations and wild leaps in the vocal line.

Soprano Nancy Allen Lundy successfully met the composer’s formidable vocal demands. Her beautiful, luminous timbre and fearless high register were matched by a pure, firmly focused core of tone and exquisite word painting and textual clarity. A veteran opera conductor (and currently resident conductor of the enterprising Chicago Opera Theater), Platt led a soaring accompaniment, bridging ethereal orchestral tone portraits with the mercurial vocal writing.

Platt concluded the matinée performance with Tchaikovsky’s rarely played Orchestral Suite No 1 in D minor, Op 43. (This was probably the work’s first performance in Florida.) Composed after the composer’s Fourth Symphony, brass fanfares of a similar nature appear early in the piece. The specter of Swan Lake seems to haunt this balletic music. Indeed the Divertimento movement (a sentimental waltz) and concluding Gavotte could well have appeared in one of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores. Although the charming Marche miniature, a favorite encore piece of conductor Arthur Fiedler, is fairly well known, the remainder of the work remains a rarity. This is all the more surprising since the six movement suite is replete with typically Tchaikovskian melodic beauty and opulent orchestration. The Intermezzo recalls the sentimentality and melancholia of the slow movements in the Serenade for Strings and Souvenir de Florence while the Scherzo is an invigorating miniature in the manner of similar movements from the composer’s early symphonies.

Platt changed the order of the movements, resulting in greater contrasts of mood, character and instrumentation. The Boca Raton Symphonia responded to his superbly coordinated leadership with a colorful, rhythmically crisp, vivacious and rousing performance. Led by concertmaster Misha Vitenson (first violin of the Amernet String Quartet), the orchestra’s silken strings had a field day with Tchaikovsky’s lush textures and beguiling melodies.

—Lawrence Budmen, Miami Beach, USA

Alexander Platt conducts the Boca Raton Symphonia in Beethoven’s Symphony No 1, Shostakovich’s Symphony No 9 and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 (with soloist Lydia Artymiw) on 22 March 2009. For information, see www.bocasymphonia.org

BOCA RATON—Fresh programming enlivens Boca Symphonia concert —At a time when the sound of belts tightening across the land would seem to invite cultural groups to play it safe, you have to hand it to the Boca Raton Symphonia for putting art first.

On Sunday afternoon at St. Andrew’s School, the chamber orchestra that’s now in its fourth season of concerts offered a fine work by a contemporary American composer as well as a rarely heard piece by Tchaikovsky on a program that also featured two briefer favorites. It was an impressive afternoon of music, intelligently conceived and expertly played, and while the level of orchestral finish was not consistently high, the freshness of the programming more than compensated for it.

Soprano Nancy Allen Lundy was the soloist with the orchestra and conductor Alexander Platt in a setting by American composer Libby Larsen of six poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese. Larsen is currently in the middle of a two-year residency at Florida Atlantic University, and is composing several new works for the college’s ensembles that will premiere in April.

Platt called the sonnet settings—written 20 years ago for the late Arleen Auger—Larsen’s “masterpiece,” and the work has all the more distinctive features of Larsen’s aesthetic: a sharp ear for good orchestral color, respect for English prosody in setting words to music, and a mild harmonic framework that gives her music a sense of geniality. Larsen knows how to frame a poem and make it come alive as a song, and that might be the most attractive thing about these pieces. Here, the singer’s voice isn’t simply one among many other instruments, as it often is contemporary classical music, but a graceful being apart.

Lundy’s voice is creamy, pleasant and rather intimate, and well-suited for these pieces, which are not vocally extravagant. On a line such as The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years (from the first song, I Once Thought How Theocritus Had Sung), which Larsen sets to a bluesy melodic line, Lundy conveyed a sense of matter-of-fact confession quite well, an effect aided by her good diction.

There’s something of the flavor of Debussy in this score (particularly the second song, My Letters) and even more of Samuel Barber (especially the sixth song, How Do I Love Thee?). The orchestra was sensitive to Lundy throughout, but not averse to exploring the more richly orchestrated pages, giving the cycle flashes of instrumental vividness as the poems explored Barrett Browning’s growing confidence in her love.

This season’s Boca Symphonia concerts have as their theme the work and influence of Tchaikovsky, and for the second half of Sunday’s program, Platt led the group in the First Orchestral Suite (in D minor, Op. 43), which as he rightly said is the most obscure of that composer’s four suites. Platt switched the order of movements three and five, placing the Scherzo before the Miniature March instead of after it.

There is some very fine music in this suite, written in 1878, and its neglect is hard to fathom. The large audience at the Roberts Theater loudly acclaimed it, and a repeat of the fourth-movement march served as the afternoon’s encore.

There were some rough spots here and there, such as the intonation of the brasses with the bassoon in the A major chord just before the violins offer the main theme of the introduction, but overall there was a good deal to admire, including the lovely lightness of the march, the exciting texture of the strings in the busy first-movement fugue (Tchaikovsky was a theory teacher early on), and the intensity with which the orchestra played the long lines of the Intermezzo.

The concert opened with the Hebrides Overture (or Fingal’s Cave, Op. 26) of Mendelssohn, an orchestral perennial that got a very swift, almost too-pushed performance as Platt sought to stress the firepower rather than the Victorian probity of the composer. And this was a reading with an abundance of energy.

Next came Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess, which had some horn slippage at the higher end of the melody, but in general came across as luminous and deeply felt. The piece, and the concert, were dedicated to the memory of the bassoonist Arthur Weisberg, a veteran educator, performer and composer who died last month of pancreatic cancer at 77.

A mention should also be made about Platt’s approach when he talks to the audience. He is a fascinating speaker whose monologues on the music to be made have a kind of dinner-party stream of consciousness that give good insight not just into what the music will be all about, but about how Platt approaches it.

On Sunday, he discussed his listening habits (all 11 discs of the complete Mendelssohn choral music, beautiful stuff that is never played) and displayed his grasp of musical and intellectual history (Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings, Tchaikovsky’s post-marriage emotional crisis), but mostly gave the impression of a man deeply committed to his orchestra and his art.

For its next concert Sunday, March 22, the Boca Symphonia and Platt will be joined by American pianist Lydia Artymiw for the Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C, K. 467), of Mozart. Also on the program are two symphonies: Beethoven’s First (in C, Op. 21) and Shostakovich’s Ninth (in E-flat, Op. 70). 2:30 pm, Roberts Theater, St. Andrew’s School, Boca Raton.

Call 376-3848, 888-426-5577, or visit the orchestra’s Website.

—Greg Stepanich

Waukesha Symphony evokes glamour of movies— Imagine sitting in a trendy Hollywood cafe in the 1940s or ‘50s and watching the stars go by. Hearing the front end of Sunday’s Waukesha Symphony was a little like that.

Korngold’s “Captain Blood” overture? There goes Errol Flynn, with all his dash and swagger. David Raksin’s theme for “Laura”? Lush and gorgeous as Gene Tierney. Max Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme” from “Gone with the Wind”? That would be someone grand and dignified—Gregory Peck, maybe.

None of it meant a darned thing, but it was all entertaining and even a little thrilling. Korngold’s 1945 Violin Concerto, which draws heavily from his movie music from the 1930s, aspired to more and entertained less.

Alexander Platt presided lovingly over all of this music and over his very well prepared Waukesha Symphony. All the glitzy Hollywood music set the stage for the centerpiece of the program, Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3(1936). This symphony is in the same idiom, but its sentiments are not whipped up to order, and its forms were made for attentive ears gathered in concert halls. This is not background music.

A simple Russian Orthodox chant heard at the outset underpins the whole symphony. In the first movement, a blazing fanfare of a first theme seems worlds apart from the dreamily lyrical second. But when Rachmaninoff knots them up in the development, you can no longer tell them apart. He untangles them miraculously in the recapitulation, and then lets us hear the chant one more time. In a pleasing flash of retrospective understanding, you can hear how closely related they are and how the other themes derive from the chant.

The orchestra, at the top of its game, responded instantly and whole-heartedly to Platt’s expressive flex and dynamic nuance. Nothing about this music is obvious, and everything within it is subtle and complex, but Platt and the WSO got to its brooding, secret heart.

This concert took place in Shattuck Auditorium at Carroll University.

—Tom Strini of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Posted: Jan. 25, 2009

Radiant Rachmaninoff— Though the Waukesha Symphony Orchestra’s January 25th concert had the apt title “Rachmaninoff & Hollywood,” Maestro Alexander Platt also dubbed it the “diaspora concert” —all the works spanned the war-torn ‘30s and ‘40s and most of the composers had escaped totalitarianism’s tight grip on Europe. The concert opened with a spirited performance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Overture to Captain Blood (1935), one of several Erroll Flynn swashbucklers Korngold scored for Hollywood. The WSO’s brass was especially effective in this rousing piece of classic film music. This was followed by music from 1944’s Laura (David Raskin), wherein the WSO’s strings dominated in sumptuous sonority. Then came music from 1939’s Gone With the Wind, featuring the famous “Tara Theme,” by Max Steiner, another fine example of mood-setting. Violinist Lara St. John was the soloist for Korngold’s Violin Concerto (1945), a lush and challenging work given a bravura performance and superb reading.

The second half of the concert consisted of a work Platt admitted has been a favorite his whole life—Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 44 (1936). Apart from a brilliant use of the orchestra that is quite striking in its own right, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Symphony is the music’s radiance—lyrical, dramatic, extremely colorful. The first movement requires expansive warmth, the second enchantment and fantasy, and the third an outpouring of exultation and jubilation; and the whole work tinged with nostalgia. The performance made Platt’s acknowledgement of affection for the Rachmaninoff Third superfluous, for the WSO has seldom been as tight, as harmonious, as precise, or indeed, as radiant. —John Jahn – Shepherd Express