Xavier Phillips plays an early 18th-century cello, and at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s Friday morning concert, you could see the blood-red burnish of age in the wood. But it was still a suitable instrument for Edward Elgar’s very 20th-century Cello Concerto, which Phillips played brilliantly with Edo de Waart conducting.
Phillips’ robust, operatic tone fits the aria-like concerto well. This is an instrumental feature rather than a structured piece with a lot of back and forth between soloist and ensemble. The last piece Elgar wrote, the Cello Concerto is his elegy to the ravages of World War I. There are still familiar Elgar echoes here – the gentle lilt of the English countryside – but it is suffused with both mourning and anger. You can hear the battle scars from the first notes, and Phillips beautifully captured the alternating moods of rage and sadness in Elgar’s gorgeous lyricism.
Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber,” which opened the concert, is also a wartime piece, but of an entirely different sort. Written in 1943, Hindemith’s little symphony is a spirited toe-tapper, even when it isn’t in the “Marcia” mode of the final movement. De Waart obviously showing off the different MSO sections in service of Hindemith’s dazzling orchestrations, moving from percussion to jazzy brass and biting woodwind passages. This was a modernist barnburner and the orchestra had a ball.
De Waart closed the concert with a solid, but not terribly inspired, reading of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote this symphony under the sway of Brahms, and it shows, displaying only the occasional signs of Czech nationalism that characterizes his better-known work. De Waart shaped some beautiful passages, particularly the lush strings’ entrance after the woodwind chorale in the second movement. And the orchestra deftly negotiated the jangly syncopations in the trio.
The concert will be repeated on Saturday night at Uihlein Hall in the Marcus Center.
