Long Beach Symphony’s “Love Stories” Season Finale

Eckart Preu, Music Director of the Long Beach Symphony, backstage at the Terrace Theater with some of the dancers from the Modern Apsara Company.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

A crash course in a few of the hand gestures integral to Cambodian dance isn’t perhaps the first thing you’d expect in a pre-concert talk but, as delivered by Mea Lath, founder and director of the Modern Apsara Company of Long Beach (not coincidentally home to the country’s largest Cambodian community), this was just part of the more-than-usually-packed half-hour preamble to the LBSO’s ambitious and colorful 90th anniversary season finale, hosted as ever by Music Director Eckart Preu.

And truly colorful the opening item was: the gorgeously-clad Modern Apsara dancers (above and below) enacted Sovann Macha and Hanuman, an excerpt from the Reamker, a version of the Sanskrit Ramayana that now forms the Cambodian national epic. Ms. Lath’s insight into this one aspect of Cambodia’s two millennia-long cultural history aptly aided understanding of the dancers’ meticulously controlled and hypnotically slow movements.

They were accompanied by the locally-based Master Ho Pin Peat Ensemble, plus discreet orchestral underpinning as arranged by Hans-Peter Preu. In a second facet of the pre-concert presentation, the Cambodian composer Chinary Ung (b. 1942)—whose own work was next on the program—had joined Ms. Lath and Maestro Preu to introduce the players, their traditional instruments, and the music itself: sonorously repetitive, dominated by the sound of deep-toned xylophones, and together with the dance bringing a brief and enigmatically impressive glimpse into a performance art profoundly different from any Western counterpart, if such there be.

Chinary Ung.

Though Ung’s Water Rings Overture (1993) is scored for quite modestly-scaled Western orchestral forces, the confident performance by Preu and the LBSO generated an imposing wall of percussion-flecked sound from within which threads of melody arose, coiled, and dissipated, confirming the impression of a static, even hieratic presence, rather than the purposeful forward movement that “overture” normally implies.

Certainly not outstaying its welcome at under seven minutes, it left this listener with a sense of something impersonal and discovered, rather than composed. The haunting and somehow open-ended quiet close to the Water Rings Overture certainly invited further exploration of Ung’s work.

If the Water Rings Overture represents one filtration of an oriental musical tradition through occidental resources, then The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, the main work in the concert’s first half, can be regarded as another, and startlingly different, one. It was written in 1959 by two Shanghai Conservatory graduate students, He Zhanhao (b.1933) and Chen Gang (b.1935), who took an ancient Chinese folk tale of forbidden love as the basis for a work combining Chinese and Western musical resources.

Banned during China’s Cultural Revolution, the work resurfaced in 1978 and has become much loved and widely performed there and farther afield (the celebrated Japanese violinist Takako Nishizaki has made no fewer than seven commercial recordings of it!). The soloist for the LBSO performance was the equally celebrated Chinese star Gao Can (below), who personally introduced the work both in the pre-concert presentation and immediately before his performance.

Unless you have a positively diabetic reaction to “sugary pictorialism” (as one sniffy British reviewer characterized it), The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto is as purely pleasurable as any other work that explores the lyrical resources of the violin (think Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending). 

After a ppp strings and harp introduction, above which a rapturous flute solo flutters and hovers (perfectly floated here by Principal Heather Clark), the violin was constantly front-and-center throughout the work’s remaining 25 minutes, and Gao Can’s playing ran the gamut from exquisite musings on the very edge of audibility to vigorous passage-work, taking in a soulful duet with Principal cellist Cécilia Tsan in the third of the work’s eight continuous sections.

The title “concerto” is indeed somewhat of a misnomer, as the piece is much more a symphonic poem with soloist telling a detailed narrative. Indeed it’s possible to imagine a performance with appropriate visuals and surtitles to keep the audience up to speed on the story. Without any of this, however, and with soloist, orchestra and conductor clearly enjoying thoroughly their collaboration, The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto was a big hit with the Long Beach audience, and Gao Can’s performance of it was cheered to the roof.

Tchaikovsky in 1877, the year he began
work on the Fourth Symphony.

After the interval it was back to the Western symphonic canon heartland with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-78), an obvious choice as it was both the work which concluded, 90 years previously to the day, the LBSO’s inaugural season in 1935, and the piece that Eckart Preu chose to conduct in his 2016 audition concert that won him the his Musical Directorship of the orchestra.

In remarks before the present performance he emphasized, understandably, the emotional turmoil Tchaikovsky was in when he wrote his Fourth Symphony, and the consequent expressive extremes that it embodies, but it is also a marvelously constructed work, a consummately fruitful interplay of impulse and craft. Indeed there’s a case to be made for the first movement—nearly as long as its three successors put together—to be regarded as the finest single symphonic structure that Tchaikovsky ever composed.

Most essentially a ballet composer, and a master at creating long, memorable melodies that don’t necessarily lend themselves to Beethovenian-style motivic development, Tchaikovsky nonetheless in this movement builds from just such elements a coherent and towering edifice that never feels forced or in danger of coming apart at the seams, despite extremes of dynamic, pace, and texture. All this was reinforced in a performance as skillfully paced and balanced in terms of both instrumental voices and control of tension and release as anyone could desire.

The Moscow Conservatory
student Antonina Miliukova:
Tchaikovsky's marriage to her
precipitated the composer’s
breakdown—the background
against which the Fourth
Symphony was composed.

As one example, the clarinet+bassoon link between the opening “Fate” fanfare and the first main theme (Tchaikovsky the ballet composer marks it In movimento di Valse) had just the right combination of hesitancy and anticipation, qualities that equally applied to the subtly applied ritardandi in the long winding down of tension, again carried by clarinet and bassoon, between the exposition’s hammering final statement of the main theme and the long-delayed emergence of the second subject, Moderato assai, quasi Andante, introduced by Principal Michael Yoshimi’s clarinet with just the right degree of lugubrious jauntiness.

As for Maestro Preu’s exemplary control of textural balance, one example that stood out among many was the nominal start of the recapitulation when the upper strings reintroduce the main subject over a timpani onslaught—all the parts are marked fff but where some conductors allow the timpani to drown out the strings, here the torrential cascade of the melody itself clearly penetrated despite timpanist Gary Long giving his considerable all.

Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s
wealthy patroness from 1877 onwards:
though they never met, their epistolary
relationship helped sustain the composer
while he was writing what he called “our
symphony,” which he dedicated to her.

The middle movements are simple ABA structures, contrasting both with the far-flung complexities of the first movement and with each other in terms of pace, scoring, and emotional character. Maestro Preu kept them moving, but at the opening of the Andantino in modo di canzona allowed room for Principal oboist Rong Huey Liu’s long solo to achieve the required plaintive melancholy, while in the scherzo the full strings showed no signs of raggedness in their long passages of rapid unison pizzicati.

The Finale’s opening lacked nothing in crash-bash excitement, giving way to thrillingly unanimous string figuration and whiplash exchanges with the wind band, so that the whole build-up to the central re-emergence of the first movement’s “Fate” motif felt hectically perilous.

But Tchaikovsky’s addition here of cymbals and bass drum gives it a showy theatricality that rather undermines the motif’s previous gaunt menace, and after the ritenuto, carefully controlled by Maestro Preu, where Tchaikovsky compresses the texture and dynamic down to cellos and basses, piano, he gave the orchestra its head in an audience-galvanizing rush to the finish.

Maestro Preu and the LBSO rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. 

It’s difficult to conceive a more fitting and dynamic conclusion to this celebratory season, and as Maestro Preu also noted in that packed pre-concert presentation, the “Love Stories” theme extended to fond farewells to three retiring members of the orchestra, Julie Feves (Principal bassoon), Paul Castillo (2nd clarinet), and Victoria Bacon (cello), each with over 40 years’ service to their credit.

Also moving on was Assistant Conductor Pola Benke (left) to a comparable role at the Pacific Symphony, and notably to her new post as Music Director of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra. Congratulations to her, and welcome to Emmanuel Rojas, the LBSO’s new Assistant Conductor!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 7, 2025, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Issy Faris, Long Beach Symphony; Chinary Ung: wmft.com; He Zhanhoa and Chen Gang: musicbookslit.com; Gao Can: China Daily; Tchaikovsky, Antonina Miliukova, Nadezhda von Mech: Wikimedia Commons.

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