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PERFORMING ARTS
From left, David Schmidt, Abigail Shue and James Shaffran in "Love's Comedy" at George Mason.
(By Rick Davis)
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-- Mark Jenkins
National Conducting Institute
It was the athletic dimension of orchestral leadership that was on display at Saturday evening's concert in the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall, where four of this year's nine National Conducting Institute participants led the National Symphony Orchestra in a program of big, splashy, colorful symphonic hits. What was hidden behind the scenes, however, was the three weeks of intensive tutelage the institute also offers in the business of being an orchestral conductor (the marketing, the public relations and the politics) -- and whatever subtle or profound musical ideas these conductors might be hatching.
Adam Burnette, Dongmin Kim and Benjamin Bolter, all of whom study or have studied at Indiana University, and Kenneth Lam, a Peabody student, have come to the institute with a lot of conducting experience, and each has been in the business long enough to have developed a musical persona. Burnette was a big-picture man, sweeping through two movements of the Berlioz "Romeo and Juliet" symphony with a batonless exuberance that made the ballroom scene almost orgiastic. Lam took on the Liszt "Prometheus" tone poem with a sense of urgency that left no space for breath but that highlighted excitement and expectations. Kim's reading of Copland's "El Salon Mexico" focused on details and punctuation, and allowed solo voices the space to speak idiomatically. And Bolter spotlighted the showiest aspects of Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 and made it look easy.
The orchestra pretty much gave each conductor what was asked for: clarity and balance where demanded and a certain amount of ambiguity and muddiness otherwise.
-- Joan Reinthaler
