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US Premiere Keynotes Symphony Concert, with Multiple Thrills and Triumphs to Follow

By Perry Tannenbaum, CVNC --

There had been no foretelling that five weeks ago, the Belk Theater stage would be splashed with the colors of Ukraine's flag for a Charlotte Symphony concert. Nor could guest conductor Karen Kamensek, making her Charlotte debut, have predicted that the music she was bringing to Knight Theater would be so pertinent to this moment: a symphony by a Finnish composer written in response to Russian oppression in 1902, and two pieces written by Russian-born composers, one of them publicly condemned by the Stalinist regime in 1948. Sadly, these works by Jean Sibelius, Victoria Borisova-Ollas, and Dmitri Shostakovich have new life and fresh significance today as the world trembles, anticipating the full consequences of the horrific Russian aggression unleashed by its unhinged leader.

Written by Vladivostok native Borisova-Ollis, a longtime Swedish citizen, in 2008 for the 850th anniversary of Munich, Germany, Angelus had its long-overdue United States premiere. Nor was the Chicago-born Kamensek unworthy of the honor, having conducted the 2022 Grammy-Award winning recording of Philip Glass' Akhnaten with the Metropolitan Opera. Although the upstage at Knight Theater wasn't lit up with Ukraine's colors, there certainly was an auspicious tableau and a sense of occasion as a phalanx of percussionists were spread across the rear of the orchestra, bells and drums and cymbals further brightened by the sounds of piano, celesta, and a pair of harps. The composer's account of how she fulfilled the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra's commission, reprinted in the digital program, lays heavy stress on the stroll she took through the city and the recordings she made of its church bells, so that aspect of the piece underscored by Kamensek's spoken intro was eagerly anticipated a pacific, spiritual answer to Putin's insane "de-Nazification" rallying cries.

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