LINDSAY DEUTSCH San Diego Chamber Orchestra: Music for the SeasonsLight Bulb revisited Most San Diegans who care about orchestral music will have no hesitancy agreeing that the San Diego Symphony traded up when they hired Jahja Ling as conductor after Jung-Ho Pak’s tenure. Many might go so far as to consider Pak a placeholder who bridged the Talmi and Ling years, a competent placeholder nonetheless with the specter of bankruptcy lurking in the wings. Yet, lest we forget, Pak did two extremely memorable things which should earn him a legitimate place in the history of the San Diego Symphony as a talented musician. The first was the extraordinary performance he led of Tan Dun’s Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind, a free concert in a parking lot in Balboa Park involving not just the Symphony musicians, but also Felix Fan on cello, red fish blue fish (playing replicas of bells almost 2-1/2-millenia-old), the San Diego Children’s Chorus, and a CD player. The second was his conversion of unremarkable outreach programs into the engaging Light Bulb Series. Outreach or family concerts are normally the province of an assistant or guest conductor, but Pak oversaw these himself. On this series, he effectively combined his gift for gab from the podium with unusual programming that featured lots of contemporary compositions, and which brought soloists from the jazz, popular, and ethnic music worlds to collaborate with the San Diego Symphony. Violinist Lindsay Deutsch was one of two featured soloists on the program. Deutsch’s competence and versatility has graced San Diego in the past, and she did not disappoint here either. In assaying Piazzolla’s Winter in Buenos Aires, from the tango master’s sly yet heartfelt The Four Seasons, Deutsch channeled Gidon Kremer (who in turned channeled the violinists in Piazzolla’s bands) with idiomatic upward swoops, scratchy crunches evocative of a guiro or rattle, and throbbing vibratos reminiscent of dance-hall tenors. She sometimes got ever so slightly ahead of her accompanying string ensemble, a no-no for classical musicians but an exciting technique found in folk and popular music all over the globe. Deutsch captured the typical bluegrass mannerisms of her part in Mark O’Connor’s Spring, and later, if any listeners harbored doubts about her legitimacy (classical, that is, not her parents’ marital status), she turned in a bravura rendition of Vivaldi’s Summer. |