Classical Concert Reviews Cinci

@cincysymphony opened its slate of concerts for March 2025 with a thrilling pairing of perhaps the most majestic orchestral music by Ottorino Respighi and a vocal/orchestral swansong by Richard Strauss.
Under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero, outgoing music director of the Nashville Symphony, the orchestra opened with one of the most unique works of Kentucky-born African-American composer Julia Perry. A Short Piece for Small Orchestra, written during a period of study in Florence, Italy in 1951, combined serial techniques then in vogue with the dissonant romanticism of composers of the Second Viennese School like Alban Berg.
South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha made a welcome return to Music Hall to give a ravishing performance of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, the last significant composition he finished prior to his death in 1949. Settings of poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, they were the perfect summation of Strauss’s skill at writing for solo voice, and Rangwanasha demonstrated that in spades. Her voice throughout was supple in lower registers and luxuriantly soaring in higher, freeflowing passages; both wonderfully came together in the final song, Im Abendrot. As an additional treat, she and the strings of the CSO encored with a luscious reading of another of Strauss’s songs, Morgen.
Ottorino Respighi’s Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome are two of the best examples of what might be called “travelogue” tone poems, evoking a kind of musical journey through depictions of various Roman landmarks. Composed 7 years apart (in 1917 and 1924, respectively) maestro Guerrero and the CSO gave one of the most passionate performances of this pair of pieces yet heard in Cincinnati. The more subdued romanticism displayed in Fountains, displayed through soaring melodies for winds and haunting string writing, gave way to utter jubilation in Pines.
Calling for a huge orchestra, including organ, an expanded percussion section, piano and 6 offstage trumpets, tonight’s performance was atmospheric yet never lacking in excitement and inspiration under Guerrero’s direction, particularly in the final Pines of the Appian Way.
Bravi tutti!