A veteran Britishpianist with a career spanning 50 years, Lill plays with a master’s control.His technical accomplishment is deep enough that he hardly works up a sweat inmeeting the demands of this famous concerto. Lill created insightful voiceleading and refined tone at any volume level. Tempos were a little on the slowside, which stressed deliberateness and clarity. If I missed anything it was asense of romantic passion and abandon.
William Bolcom (b.1938) is one of only a handful of American composers born in the 1930s andafter to have become a permanent part of the repertory. He is most known forhis operas, performed at major houses, and his art songs, piano works andchamber music. We rarely encounter a Bolcom orchestral work such as Commedia for (almost) 18th-Century Orchestra,composed in 1972. Written for the then new St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, thepiece stresses small combinations of instruments, wittily tilting the familiarmusical vocabulary of the era of Mozart and Haydn gently askew. Such soundssave it from the obscurity of most of the deadly dull, atonal, academic musicwritten in the 1960s and ’70s.
Guest conductorRossen Milanov selected the Bolcom work undoubtedly as a companion to thecommedia elements in Stravinsky’s Petroushka.It proved to be a deft choice. Milanov led both works with a light and gracefultouch that encouraged chamber-like playing from the MSO. Petroushka (heard here in the composer’s 1947 revision) sparkledwith transparency on Saturday evening. The many magical colors of theorchestration came through like a parade of beguiling treats. I admired theagile, sharply drawn crispness of the performance. Several soloists rose to theoccasion with heightened playing, including Wilanna Kalkhof on piano, MarkNiehaus on trumpet, Jeani Foster on flute and Todd Levy on clarinet.
