On the heels of Hurricane Helene’s devastating arrival and departure, a sizable audience gathered at Jacoby Hall for an evening of moving music. The Jacksonville Symphony continued its celebration of its 75th anniversary season on Friday and Saturday nights with a knack for assembling a cast of musical luminaries — both familiar and new. Notable guests at this opening concert of the Florida Blue Classical Series were composer Brittany J. Green and pianist Joyce Yang. The concert opened with a world premiere of Green’s engaging new work for orchestra, “TESTIFY!” The tightly focused, eight-minute work for full orchestra features delightfully buoyant rhythms and a joyful tambourine. Composed as a musical snapshot of a feeling, “TESTIFY!” convincingly explores the interplay of orchestral conventions — where professional musicians read from sheet music — with Green’s memories of “Mama — a self-proclaimed ‘non-musician,’” as the program notes explain. Percussionist Joel Panian’s expertly executed tambourine feature, a rare focus for the repertoire, shined a glimmer of dance-like freedom onto the ensemble’s otherwise frequently heady programming. Following the composer’s instruction for lighthearted whoops from those on stage, the piece started up with playful clarinet licks leading to jaunty string phrases. Glimpses of a Sunday morning hymn (“I’m So Glad”) appeared through the dancing moments, although the performance’s high points called out for more rhythmic risk-taking from the ensemble. Taking cues from the American minimalist tradition and grounded in Green’s engagement with Black feminist theory, “TESTIFY!” showed the Jacksonville Symphony and its audience embracing a world centered on musical memory, maternal influence and bodily shouts and dances. With Green’s inspiring compositional vision so convincingly embraced, the Symphony heralded a new era of the Classical Series’s depth and relevance. Turning from the gleefully new to the warmly familiar, the Symphony gave a substantial account of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Starting with pianist Joyce Yang’s strong entrance to the stage, then her powerful sound in the opening chords, the performers turned all eyes on stage and the audience could not look away. An earthy sound in the strings’ opening theme complimented the refined dynamism of Yang’s virtuosity in the opening movement. Music Director Courtney Lewis’s minimal direction wisely shepherded the ensemble’s collaboration, bringing attention to Yang’s commanding presence through her mastery of the work. The second movement saw moments of the ensemble overshooting its aim in accommodating the soloist, allowing the piano’s brilliance and volume to outshine an overly still and almost timid sound. The hard work of coordinating Rachmaninoff’s complicated phrases between soloist and orchestra paid off in a serene close to the second movement. The Symphony helped ground Yang’s pianistic fireworks in the final movement, bringing the partnership to an amiable close in the final movement’s bright ending. After the intermission, the Symphony brought to the stage an altogether different VIP — the ideal hero of Strauss’s epic “Ein Heldenleben” (“A Hero’s Life”). This tone poem depicting an imaginary hero’s life story (the hero likely being the composer himself) provided the Symphony a chance to celebrate the heroes among its own ranks in an epic musical journey. Lewis’s eye for long-term pacing invited the audience along on a thrilling ride to start, carrying listeners forward with a balanced attention to the big picture and Strauss’s nearly overwhelming small details. Following a robust rendition of the opening section, the characterization of the hero’s adversaries (Strauss’s infamously unflattering depiction of music critics like myself!) lacked the chaos of the critics’ chatter, instead presenting too beautiful a sound in the winds. Beauty and warmth gloriously found their proper home in “The Hero’s Companion,” with the ensemble’s gentle interludes answering concertmaster Adelya Nartadjieva’s mesmerizing solos that featured particularly expressive double stops. Offstage trumpets brilliantly ushered in the Symphony’s especially characterful account of “The Hero at Battle”. While the performance’s transition to peaceful resolution lost dramatic intensity, the work’s final retreat highlighted some of the Symphony’s best moments of the evening. Lewis’s gesture here evolved into its most refined, and the return of violin solos brought intimacy to the performance. Perhaps most striking, principal hornist Kevin Reid displayed a balanced sense for expressiveness and precision in the closing moments’ unforgettable solo. Following such a large undertaking, I left with a sense that the VIP list on stage extended beyond the program’s headliners.
Matt Bickett is a musician and scholar living in Jacksonville.
