Dazzling Performance of Music Rarely Encountered

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Photo credit: Johs Boe

Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk

It’s always thrilling to hear the master of an instrument in a piece that shows just about everything possible. Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk gave a dazzling performance Saturday evening with Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

The music was the rarely encountered Sinfonia concertante by Sergei Prokofiev, which is essentially a large-scale cello concerto. Mørk has a gorgeous sound that easily fills the hall at any dynamic level. His playing is technically brilliant and incisive, with intense rhythmic energy. Besides the flashy and fiendishly difficult cadenzas, there was plenty of poetry in this performance, with sweetness in the sound. The audience roared enthusiastically at the end and gave him two curtain calls before Mørk played a soulful encore, which seemed to be a pensive folksong.

Veteran conductor Hans Graf led the concert from the podium, and his experience with orchestras was obvious. Former music director of the Houston Symphony, Graf served the music and the musicians without fussiness or overstatement. It was more a situation of letting the music blossom, which I admire.

Before the Prokofiev piece a colorful account of Samuel Barber’s 14-minute Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance was heard. This music, adapted from a ballet score, is more angular than most by this composer, who usually wrote warm melodies. It began with pensive mystery and heated up to driving fury.

The nearly sold-out audience surely was there to hear Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World.” This was written when the composer was living in the U.S. and incorporates what Dvořák called “the spirit of these national American melodies.” The symphony composed in 1892-93 had wide influence in the first decades of the 20th century, which can be heard in Jerome Kern’s score for Show Boat and the underscoring in Hollywood movies such as Gone with the Wind.

Graf and the orchestra gave an excellent performance, bringing out all the contrasts and highlighting the drama. In what may be the most famous English horn solo ever written, Margaret Butler played with style and nuance, and was cheered at the end when acknowledged for a solo bow.