Review: Oregon Symphony's concert, featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Akiho, and Green

Andy Akiho takes a bow - photo by Jason Quigley

Guest review by Joshua Lickteig

— The month of May’s final concert for the Oregon Symphony was one of full volume and conveyed discernment through kinetic assortment and distinct traditions. The motion in the building at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall the evening of Saturday the 30th was in fervid flow. The evening’s program, “Percussion & Rhythm”, spanned works separated by nearly 150 years.

The latter half brought a luminous rendering of Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878) by Tchaikovsky, a work not indirect in foretelling future music. The orchestra here illuminates an early modernist seer following their daring and considered voyage with Andy Akiho’s "Percussion Concerto" (2019) and Brittany J. Green’s "Testify!" (2024).

The sectional shifts of Symphony No. 4 highlighted varieties of responsibility across instruments, recurring through fanfare to vanity to ache to acceptance, and shared anchorage of brass and woodwind and strings. The most notable of Music Director and Conductor David Danzmayr’s enthralling guidance showed in the timing of the piccolo passage in movement III. (Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato), the counterposing of the finale’s use of Russian folk with the rhetorical Russian imperial style of movement I. (Andante Sostenuto), and the finale’s swift call and response between orchestra and horns. The melody of exposed bassoon was both joyous and inquisitive.

"Testify!" arrived as its own whirlwind, preceding the Tchaikovsky in OSO's first performance of the work. In just five minutes, building from a church tambourine pattern — maternal influence made orchestral by Green (b. 1991) — and bodily jubilation scored as cheerful exclamations of joy, the piece bloomed into something the musicians would collectively discover rather than perform. Green’s invention runs through Julius Eastman’s organic minimalism — rhythm as living, breathing testimony rather than process — and from the stage emanated a sonic prism.

Across three movements and an interlude, the "Percussion Concerto" opened the evening with a cosmic assortment of instrumentation: ceramic bowls, marimba, toy piano, brake drum, vibraphone, other found objects — each not merely played but awakened. OSO inhabited an urgency evocative of performing "Rite of Spring," but less insistent and more transparent, sometimes giving way to impulse, but mostly to discipline. Destabilizing metric jolts in the progression of the first movement (Ceramic) transposed forces active in the timeless earth and heavens, dissolving the questioning of categories of music in the way of yielding to vital force. In places, staccato phrasings would later find their mirror in Symphony No. 4, as would thunderous and glistening celebrations of triangle, timpani, and bass drum. Some sounds achieved were abstruse; bow on vibraphone, for instance, like a ghostly synthesizer. Akiho (b. 1979) was seated for the concerto in the west dress circle, then appeared on stage with the orchestra alongside Danzmayr, the percussionists Michael Roberts, Stephen Kehner, Jon Greeney, and Sergio Carreno, receiving ovation after ovation. An encore performance included Akiho with steel pan in a special arrangement of his composition "Daidai Iro | Orange" for percussion quintet. The concert was recorded for commercial release.

Also note that on June 5, Reference Recordings released “Beneath Lighted Coffers: Concerto for Steel Pans & Orchestra” the Oregon Symphony's first album under David Danzmayr, featuring the same four percussionists who premiered the Percussion Concerto six years ago with Colin Currie.

The night’s program, nearing the close of OSO’s 129th season, was concentric in lucid sonority, each work drawn toward the others in a way neither announced nor explained, yet each questioning its own purpose and happiness in profoundly different ways. Rhythm was not ornamental but architectural. And melodic configurations expressed how the ordinary is transformed through observation.