REVIEW | Young conductor leads Chicago Sinfonietta on wild ride
Chicago Sun-Times
By Bryant Manning
March 31, 2010
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Successful young conductors often have a great story to tell, and the 29-year-old, Mexican-born Alondra de la Parra has a doozy. While most conservatory grads are racing to audition for an orchestra, de la Parra, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, started her own.
In 2004 in New York City, she founded the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, an international symphonic ensemble that emphasizes Latin American composers and musicians. Their budget has ballooned, and now with multiple education outreach programs extending into urban areas of need, POA is as much a cultural force as it is musical. Movers and shakers in classical music need to think outside the score, and De la Parra is already one them.
On Monday night at Orchestra Hall, she made an impressive area debut with the Chicago Sinfonietta, an organization that appreciates social action behind the music. The New York-based conductor was an ideal communicator for its “Las Americas” program, highlighting the rhythmic and dance elements in symphonic music.
What more appropriate way than to start off with Piazzolla? His “Tangazo” is a hybrid work with two very different halves: one part a brooding, Wagnerian string lament, the other a fully bloomed tango. De la Parra fluidly shaped them both, even when the music lost its polish because of some blooper-heavy horn playing.
Given her work as a philanthropist, she was a charming and witty speaker as she introduced Mexican composer Arturo Marquez’s concerto for cello, “Espejos en la Arena” (“Mirrors in the Sand”). This was a suitable vehicle to hear the virtuosic gifts of 20-year-old cellist Tony Rymar, a first-prize winner in the 2009 Sphinx competition. He has a veteran’s feel for his instrument and whatever expressive limits there are in this showpiece, he rose above them. It was hard not to imagine an improvising percussionist as he nimbly navigated his cello’s fingerboard.
After the intermission, this rhythmic spontaneity was sometimes missing in Beethoven’s Seventh, often called his “dance symphony.” It felt as if the conductor and the orchestra were too comfortable with Beethoven’s boisterous score, seemingly reluctant to go beyond the standard motions and indulge its many whims. The symphony’s abundance of surprise transitions unfolded laboriously, even at times anti-climactically.
But oh what fun the last movement was, with the young conductor mastering Beethoven’s propulsive rhythms and leading the Sinfonietta on a wild ride. For that alone she deserved the long standing ovation the audience bestowed upon her.
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