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Florida Orchestra season opens with Rachmaninoff in triumphant fashion

 
Published Oct. 4, 2015

TAMPA — Before the first note sounded for the first concert of the season, the Florida Orchestra faced a daunting challenge.

Friday's performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 marked the debut of Michael Francis as music director, only the fourth in the orchestra's 48-year history. In recent months, the opener took on a new significance with the appearance of guest pianist Valentina Lisitsa, whose caustic and insulting tweets stemming from the conflict in her native Ukraine led to the cancellation of concerts in April by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Had Francis begun to mold the orchestra to his liking? Would Lisitsa's support of pro-Russian separatists in tweets that offended many spark protest, as they had with gaggles of picketers in Calgary and Pittsburgh?

No demonstrators were seen outside the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. Instead, the Rachmaninoff performance was a triumph for the orchestra and for Lisitsa. She dazzled with a brilliant rendition of one of the most difficult compositions ever written, what Francis called "a Mount Everest of a concerto."

After the National Anthem, Francis surprised the audience with trumpets from the fourth floor playing Benjamin Britten's Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury. The concert centerpiece then demonstrated the darkness from Rachmaninoff, who suffered a nervous breakdown after his first symphony and was still emerging when Concerto No. 3 debuted in 1909, as well as its stirring resolution.

Lisitsa, who catapulted her career in the last decade through YouTube, is a pro who showed why she is on the world stage. She did not need to overpower or make a show of feeling.

But when called upon, she delivered the complexity and passion of the composer with timing and guts. Her fingers sprinted down tiny staircases of notes, evoking intellectual arguments and counter-arguments and proofs.

Periods of emotional intensity gave way to a peaceful flute, a reflective oboe. With an additional uptick of support from the strings, Lisitsa drove the concerto to its slam-dunk climax, bringing audience members instantly to their feet.

She returned for a curtain call, punctuated by three sustained bursts of applause and cheers. Another curtain call followed, and Lisitsa responded with an unscripted encore of Franz Liszt's La Campenella.

After intermission, the orchestra grew from 72 to 86 musicians for Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3, so iconically American that Leonard Bernstein likened it to the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial.

Copland wanted to please Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and to capture the spirit of the American people as Dmitri Shostakovich had done with the Soviet Union. Premiering in 1946, the symphony embodies both victory and the costs of war; both industrialization and a desire to return to a more pastoral way of life.

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That progression unfolds with a reprise of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, appearing in fragments of the first three movements and anchoring the fourth. The first movement embodies an internal clash with trombones competing in harmony and dissonance, "almost like the heartbeat of the soul of the nation," Francis said.

At times Francis is impossible not to watch. He conducts with his wrists. He conducts with his elbows. He conducts with his knees. His baton draws parentheses in the air, and commas and exclamation points.

In the end the mood was set, the Florida Orchestra's long-term hopes bolstered. As orchestra president Michael Pastreich said after the concert, "You can tell this is the start of a new era."

Contact Andrew Meacham at ameacham@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2248. Follow @torch437.