Benefit concert

Last night the National Symphony Orchestra played a benefit concert for their Young Soloists' Competition, a national program that supports 18–25 year old musicians, ultimately giving the winner $10,000 and a chance to play with the NSO in May.

Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris music director Christoph Eschenbach, long a champion of young musicians, conducted the NSO in a vibrant performance of familiar old war horses. Eschenbach did the entire concert from memory and got quite the physical workout from his vigorous conducting.

Eschenbach protégé violinist Erik Schumann, age 25, from Germany played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35). The audience seemed quite impressed with the young man, giving him sustained applause after the first movement and then awarding him a brief standing ovation at the conclusion of the concerto. I thought he was quite good, though certainly not the child prodigy of, say, a younger Joshua Bell. His playing is still a bit bright and doesn't quite have the soul-pulling depth and maturity of sound and vibrato he'll no doubt develop as he continues to play; that is made all the more apparent because of the instrument he plays, the 1722 "Jupiter" Stradivarius.

The Tchaikovsky, while one of the standard works in the virtuosic violinist repertoire, is fiendishly difficult to play. In fact, Tchaikovsky had a hard time finding a violinist to premiere the work, with many famous violinists of the time declaring it "unplayable." It's in those "unplayable" cadenzas that a violinist is tested, and while Schumann played the notes, he still hasn't quite mastered the art of keeping those occasional stratospherically high notes from popping up out of context from the rest of the musical line. A couple of other times, he lost sound as he attempted diminuendos at the end of some very high pianissimo passages.

At the same time, though, there were times Schumann played with great passion and fire. And, as I mentioned, the Tchaikovsky certainly is not an easy work to play, so he definitely has technical skills. I expect that as he grows and matures in his musicality, we will see a lot of Erik Schumann on the international concert stage. I hope also as he gains more and more experience, he'll gain more self-confidence, as he definitely looked rather shy on stage and almost embarrassed to receive the audience's applause and adulation.

One of the disadvantages of being an Eschenbach protégé is exposure to Eschenbach's sartorial choices. Rather than a standard tail coat with white tie, or even a tuxedo jacket with black tie, Eschenbach chose to wear what looked like a loose, Nehru-style, black jacket, buttoned all the way up to the throat. Schumann wore a similar black jacket, but opted to wear his open all the way, revealing an untucked, black and taupe print, square-tailed, banded collar shirt underneath.

We heard Johannes Brahms' dramatic Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 in the second half of the concert. The themes of the first and last movements are well-known to those who listen to very much classical music or radio stations. Those movements were fine; what caught my attention, though, was the penultimate movement, when the orchestra played with hoppy excitement under Eschenbach's frenetic conducting.

The audience liked the Brahms, with many people in the audience (remember that this was a fund raiser for young artist programs and there were, no doubt, a lot of adoring parents in the audience unused to concert going) applauding between movements, and then standing for two lengthy curtain calls.