MUSIC REVIEW : American Premiere of Concerto for 2 Harps Is Uninspired

There are certain programming choices that make potential audience members understandably apprehensive. Tuba concertos and all-accordion orchestras readily come to mind as notable examples. Perhaps concertos for multiple harps should be added to that list.

Friday night at Sherwood Auditorium, Zoltan Rozsnyai and his International Orchestra gave Jean Francaix’s 1979 Concerto for Two Harps its American premiere, according to the program. This busy, uninspired neoclassical exercise in the time-honored three-movement concerto form sounded like a movie score in search of a decent plot. In spite of the polished playing by solo harpists Susanna Mildonian and Ping Hu, the concerto was decidedly unmemorable.

Earlier on the program, Mildonian had given a stirring account of Adrien Boieldieu’s Harp Concerto. Mildonian, an Italian virtuosa with an impressive performance and recording pedigree, relished the work’s bright, articulate figuration, and her rhythmic precision and crisp ornamentation made the work delectable. Though Boieldieu was a contemporary of Beethoven, the celebrated (in his own time) French opera composer cast his technically demanding harp concerto in an ingratiating Mozartean style. The orchestra handled the modest demands of this idiom with aplomb.

Never one to be hemmed in by orthodox musical choices, Rozsnyai opened the concert with Charles Gonoud’s “Petite Symphonie” for wind instruments and closed with Claude Debussy’s “Nocturnes.” The winds of the International Orchestra gave Gounod’s jaunty chamber piece a respectable reading, although such pieces never completely erase the image of a small town bandstand on a Sunday afternoon. Nevertheless, principal flute Nan Shang Zhou and principal oboe William Anderson deserve praise for their lyrical and shapely solos that enlivened the otherwise careful performance.

Rozsnyai’s full orchestra evidenced laudable control in “Nuages,” Debussy’s first “Nocturne,” but lost their Impressionist sense of style in the second, “Fetes,” where the brass shamelessly overbalanced the rest of the orchestra, which was none too subtle.