Conductor Franceso Lecce-Chong

TWIN PEAKS AND TWIN PIANOS AT THE SANTA ROSA SYMPHONY

The May 6 Santa Rosa Symphony concert began and ended on two different mountains, with several perilous ascents and descents marking the space between. The first mountain was Ukraine’s Bald Mountain, as depicted by Modest Mussorgsky in “Night on Bald Mountain,” and the second mountain was Heimgarten, a peak near the Bavarian Alps, as depicted by Richard Strauss in “An Alpine Symphony.”

According to legend, Bald Mountain is the site of a yearly Witches’ Sabbath on Midsummer Night. (The “mountain” is actually a hill with a bald top located in the city of Kyiv.) Mussorgsky seizes on the witch legend in the opening measures and never lets go. From the beginning, the air is filled with the eerie sounds of low brass, shimmering strings and evocative woodwinds.

The strings’ precise bowings and solid unison lines were impressive in the midst of the boisterous revelry. Meanwhile, Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong coaxed several effective crescendos and decrescendos out of the players as they made their way through the frenetic scene. All the notes were in place, and many were inspired.

The world premiere of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” with sisters Christina and Michelle Naughton as soloists, occupied the space between Bald Mountain and the Bavarian Alps.

The piece, which follows the standard three-movement concerto form, opens with both pianos playing a foreboding theme in unison in their lower registers. The theme soon changes to jazzy riffs as the orchestra enters, with the pianists still playing in unison. Thereafter the jazz theme dominates, with plenty of blue notes, even as the unison playing continues from the pianos. At the end of the movement, one of the pianos holds a long sustained note. Normally these kinds of notes come from organs rather than pianos, but it’s possible that the piano on stage had a particularly good “sostenuto” pedal.

In contrast to the jazz-inflected first movement, the second features calm and stately themes. Another change is that the pianos stop playing in unison. One piano takes upper line, and the other piano takes the lower line. This greater flexibility in the piano line(s) ushers in some lush and atmospheric music, which the pianos seem to float over.

The third movement opens with a piano duet on jazz themes, with occasional drums in the background and seemingly perpetual runs up and down both keyboards. Here the Naughton sisters showed off their potent skills, not only as performers, but also as agile and effective communicators with each other.

As the piano runs tailed off, a slow passage arose, bringing with it the ghost of Rachmaninoff. For several measures, Zwilich’s concerto sounds like the opening of the Russian master’s third piano concerto. There was soft percussion in the background, a tentative entry from the pianos, and then a welcoming response from the orchestra.

After the ghost departed, the pianos initiated a long build-up to the end of the concerto. The playing of the Naughton sisters and the orchestra continued to be impeccable and inspiring. The decisive ending notes gave rise to a sustained ovation and several call-backs to the stage for Mr. Lecce-Chong and the Naughton sisters.

Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony“ is endurance test for audiences and musicians alike. The program listed the “estimated duration” at 52 minutes, without a break. Strauss, one of classical music’s greatest orchestrators, ensured a diversity of timbre and tone by adding four Wagner tubas, twelve cowbells and a heckelphone (baritone oboe) to the instrumental mix, along with 16 offstage players, including two trumpets, two trombones and a dozen horns.

The Symphony tells the story of an all-day hike that Strauss and his companions took to the top of Heimgarten, a peak at the north end of the Bavarian Alps, when Strauss was still a teenager. The symphony is one long movement, but it’s helpfully divided into 22 “episodes” that depict sights and events along the way. The episodes begin with “Night,” “Sunrise” and “The Ascent,” followed by “Entering the Forest’ and “Wandering Near the Stream.” Once you figure how Strauss depicts the content of each episode, the symphony becomes more coherent and less of a long haul.

The musicians did an admirable job all around of maintaining the energy and accuracy necessary for a memorable performance. They were helped considerably in this effort by Mr. Lecce-Chong, who conducted without a score. The opening bars set the symphony on the right path. The strings held sustained low notes with slow bow movements. They were shortly joined by the brass, also on low (really low) notes. Rather than falling apart, the strings and brass got stronger and louder as they ascended the scale, leading to a tumultuous rise to a suspended (unresolved) chord. Other composers might try to resolve the dramatic rise of the strings and brass into a climactic chord, but not Strauss. He is just getting going with his narrative and needs to persist until the end.

As the symphony proceeded through the waterfall, the apparition, the blooming meadows and the Alpine pasture, the players offered a wonderfully engaged performance. There were good solos from several sections, including the first violins and the woodwinds. The dozen cowbells, which were hanging from a wooden frame, proved a welcome addition when Strauss’s hike reached the summit.

Hikers say that the descent down a mountain is more difficult than the ascent, and that proved to be true for the orchestra as they played their way down to the bottom of Strauss’s mountain. Some sections began to drag slightly, and this reviewer began to wonder how they could sustain Strauss’s frantic tempi and his wild dynamics for the rest of the piece. As it turned out, there was no need for doubt.

A woodwind solo beyond this reviewer’s sight (was it the heckelphone?) seemed to inspire the players in the woodwind section to go all out, followed by a similar burst of energy from the violins. As the orchestration grew denser, an organ entered the fray, suggesting singing from a distant church.

The organ wasn’t enough. No sooner was it done playing than a tremendous storm whipped up, leading to rapid bowing from the strings and the unveiling of the wind and thunder machines in the percussion section. These were played adroitly, conjuring up a thunderstorm within seconds. At last, the sun went down, the sound of the storm dissipated, and night descended.

The applause was instantaneous and sustained. After all the fires, floods and pandemics of recent years, the Santa Rosa Symphony was back in fine form.