By Terry Pow
For the Jackson Citizen Patriot
Tuesday, November 6, 2001

The get-go challenge facing any soloist performing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto is the work's daunting popularity.

It's so well known you can almost hum it backwards. How, -then, to make it fresh?

Kimberly Schmidt, the Jackson Symphony Orchestra's guest Saturday night, took a direct approach - presenting the drama but soft-pedaling the theatricality into which performers of the piece are often tempted.

Whenever music is allowed to speak for itself, rather than through the filter of a virtuoso's straining ego, the result is the more satisfying.

Demonstrative Schmidt is not - but, then, neither is he dull.  Not a bit.

The expected fireworks were there, whizzing and banging in the cascading chords of the first and last movements.

But Schmidt didn't pile it on, and he negotiated the sudden shifts to the lyrical passages with grace and sensitivity.

It was a musically satisfying and exciting performance, supplemented by vigorous accompaniment from the JSO.

The evening's theme was "romanticism" - understood in a broad sense and introduced with a brisk performance of Mozart's "Overture to the Marriage of Figaro.

This was followed by a delightful nugget, "Dido's Lament from Dido and Aeneas," by the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell, with soprano Melissa Osmond in lovely voice.  I'd like to make a plea for a concert performance of this wonderful music.

The meat of the first half - a thick slab of 1930s-era sirloin was Howard Hanson's "Second Symphony," dubbed "Romantic."

Visitors to Interlochen will have immediately recognized the haunting central theme, borrowed from Hanson's symphony and performed at the festival after every concert.

Music director Stephen Osmond and his team wrapped their hearts and minds around this succulent score in a performance that delighted at many levels, not least with the whisper-quiet chord from the strings that marks the end of the first section.

All this and a win by Michigan State. Could life be sweeter?

© 2001 Jackson Citizen Patriot.
All rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission