I’ve never met Christopher Seaman, but watching him take the podium at Saturday’s Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert, he seemed like a classic British music nerd. His conducting style is reserved—no sweeping dramatic gestures or cocky flamboyance. He seemed as much Oxford don as jet-setting international conductor.
But oh, what dynamic music he coaxed out of the MSO. In a generous program of works written in a very narrow time window—more or less the first decade of the 20th century—he created an aural travelogue of sonically rich nationalism.
It opened with Italy by way of Britain, Edward Elgar’s tone poem, In the South (1903-04), inspired by Elgar’s vacation time in the Italian Riviera. It wears its Italian emotions on its British sleeve, opening with lush string tutti’s and slam-bang brass fanfares. But the highlight was Robert Levine’s tender viola solo, a rare chance to hear one of the orchestra’s great players.
Violinist Karen Gomyo has a way with tender lyricism—she demonstrated that in the introspective Adagio di molto of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (1903). But most of her performance was given over to bravura virtuosity, shifting gears from blazing, angular cadenzas to contemplative meditations in the eclectic first movement. And driving the dance rhythms forward in the third movement Allegro. In Gomyo’s ebullient reading, even this Scandinavian composer’s ideas sounded positively Italian.
The second half of the program comprised two pieces written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, and they shared the splash and dazzle that hotbed of early modern dance. The rarely heard La Péri (poème dansé) (1911), by Paul Dukas, is filled with rich impressionist colors and a romantic sensibility. And it again offered a showcase for the MSO’s brass and horns. But nothing like the familiar and bracing Firebird, Stravinsky’s 1919 arrangement of his famous ballet music. Here, Seaman and the orchestra reveled in the unusual textures and vocabulary—the ominous bass figure in the beginning, the composer’s imaginative way with woodwinds, and his blend of folk melodies with unfamiliar scales. It, of course, ends in that bracing fanfare, one of the most exhilarating few minutes in 20th century music. Even at the end of this orchestral marathon, Seaman and the MSO found a way to make it take flight.
