The Nashville Symphony Orchestra often plans its programs years in advance. So the performance over the weekend of American composer Frank Ticheli’s Radiant Voices was surely an act of serendipity.
Ticheli, a longtime professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, began composing his luminous work for large orchestra just one week after the outbreak of civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992. The feelings of hope and joy that Ticheli wanted to convey back then are needed just as much now.
Lasting about 20 minutes, Radiant Voices is a single-movement work consisting of four well-delineated sections. The slow parts are lyrical and deeply personal; fast parts are rhythmically vital and colorful. The work, as a whole, shimmers incandescently.
The NSO couldn’t have found a better interpreter than guest conductor Carl St. Clair, the maestro who premiered Radiant Voices in 1993 with the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. He led the NSO in a performance that was remarkable for its precision and clarity. Principal cellist Anthony LaMarchina, for his part, delivered some of the evening’s most memorably beautiful solos. Friday night’s performance won a heartfelt ovation, and the composer, who was at the Schermerhorn, basked in its radiant glow.
The weekend’s program featured a last-minute substitute: Pianist Benjamin Pasternack stepped in for Ingrid Fliter to perform Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Pasternack’s performance was sensational. He played the concerto with just the right amount of fleetness, lightness and lyricism. He also coaxed some of the biggest, most dramatic sounds I’ve heard from the NSO’s Steinway. His performance received thunderous applause, and the only disappointment was that he didn’t play an encore.
St. Clair specializes in conducting contemporary American music, but that didn’t stop him from closing his concert with a memorable performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique.” His reading was full of passion and febrile intensity — the pathos in the work’s slow finale was heart-rending. The NSO acquitted itself with distinction, performing with urgency and edge-of-your-seat virtuosity.
