“Voices of Strength” from the Santa Monica Symphony

Music Director Pola Benke recognizing the Santa Monica Symphony's long-serving members.

REVIEW

Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, JAMS Performing Arts Center, Santa Monica

DAVID J BROWN

Pola Benke.

Having missed Pola Benke’s first season as the Santa Monica Symphony’s new Music Director (“Scenes from Life,” 2025-2026), it was more than time to head north for the opening concert of her second, at the comfortable, attractive, and acoustically fine 750-seat auditorium of the John Adams Middle School Performing Arts Center. This season’s theme is “Voices” and the “Voices of Strength” on the bill were Nordic, Slavic, and Bohemian in turn, in a program that almost, but not quite, adhered to the time-honored overture/concerto/symphony layout.

The almost-overture was one of Sibelius’s many small-scale celebratory pieces, his Andante festivo JS34b, commissioned in 1922 by the management of the Finnish Säynätsalo sawmill to mark its 25th anniversary. In 1929 he expanded the string quartet original for performance at a niece’s wedding, and nine years later—acceding to a proposal that he conduct one of his own works for a live transatlantic broadcast to the New York World’s Fair—directed the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in the piece, newly rescored for string orchestra and timpani. This was Sibelius’s last appearance on an orchestra podium and the only performance by him that seems to have survived.

Jean Sibelius in 1939.

To judge by her account—paced judiciously between spaciousness and onward flow—the Andante festivo is close to Pola Benke’s heart, and her rapport with the SMSO strings showed in their unanimity throughout and careful observance of the work’s slow dynamic shifts. As ever, Sibelius’s genius withholding of the timpani until the final four measures imparted its thrilling frisson of unanticipated extra sonority.

The evening’s concerto was no over-played Romantic warhorse. If—to quote Ms. Benke’s own eloquent program note—the Andante festivo’s “strength comes from simplicity, dignity, and calm,” that of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 (1959) lay in his resilience and “remarkable ability to preserve his own artistic voice.” Though written well into the post-Stalin “Khrushchev thaw” the concerto is a haunted, emotionally ambivalent work, pivoting between teeth-clenched jauntiness in its outer movements and stillness in the Moderato second movement.

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1959.

In the more than capable hands of Polish-born cellist Marek Szpakiewicz, the obsessive repetition of the opening four-note motif (a kind of variant on Shostakovich’s personal DSCH motto) felt emblematic of constraint or even entrapment, with the astringent rhythmic responses crisply cued by Ms. Benke’s baton and punched out by the SMSO winds—the piccolo’s upward skirls especially prominent—taking that motif by the scruff of the neck and relentlessly propelling it onward (for anyone regarding Shostakovich as a prolix composer the snappy brevity of this first movement is the perfect corrective!).

Marek Szpakiewicz.

Mr. Szpakiewicz’s almost-continuous cello line in the slow movement had all the espressivo that the composer repeatedly demands, and the numerous duets between soloist and other players were immaculately cued and executed. Almost uniquely, this concerto’s cadenza comprises an entire, independent movement, exploratory rather than virtuosic, and here Mr. Szpakiewicz sounded all its emotional resonances before the increasingly animated solo line triggered the finale.

The Allegro con moto finale revisits the first movement’s agitated substance, with in this performance particularly arresting contributions from shrill clarinet and clamant single horn (another aspect of Shostakovich’s economy in this concerto is its modest forces). Though the finale effectively ties thematic knots back to the first movement, it offers no real catharsis, which can make Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto a difficult work to bring off successfully in concert. Here, however, the wholehearted applause signalled the fine achievement of soloist, conductor, and orchestra alike.

Mr. Szpakiewicz returned for an encore, a rapt account of Ennio Morricone’s main theme from Once Upon a Time in the West that towards the end included a pause so daringly protracted that some may have wondered whether he had in fact finished.

Pola Benke opened the second half with tributes to and acknowledgments of the SMSO’s most long-serving members, and then proceeded to its one work, the Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, B. 141 (1884-85) by Antonin Dvořák. Though by measure count it’s the shortest of his nine, as well as the most economically scored, the Seventh is—as host Rich Capparela noted in some introductory remarks—generally held by Dvořák aficionados to be the greatest of them, and Ms. Benke’s powerfully integrated performance certainly underlined the claim.

Antonin Dvořák in 1882.

The first movement marking, Allegro maestoso, is an immediate conductorial challenge—too fast, and you compromise the majesty; too slow, and momentum is lost—but to these ears Ms. Benke got it just right, with the opening theme on violas and cellos, rising and falling back on itself within its limited pitch range, purposeful yet imbued with foreboding. The movement proceeded with authority and surety of aim towards the tragic power of the recapitulation’s climax and then its dramatic collapse back into the dark mood of the opening, and the drawn-out pianissimo conclusion.

The Poco adagio slow movement unfolded just as coherently, with some noble solo horn contributions, and if the Scherzo could have benefited from just a little more driven inexorability, the finale didn’t drop a stitch. It accumulated expressive weight and intensity so that the overwhelmingly tragic coda felt fully earned, Ms. Benke and her fine orchestra drawing on yet more reserves of power to deliver it as molto maestoso as Dvořák could have desired. Bravo!

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Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra, JAMS Performing Arts Center, 1630 Pearl St, Santa Monica, Saturday, September 19, 2026, 7.00 p.m.

Images: The performance: author; Pola Benke: Courtesy Long Beach Symphony; Sibelius, Shostakovich, Dvořák: Wikimedia Commons; Marek Szpakiewicz: Azusa Pacific University; Once Upon a Time in the West poster: www.themagnificent60s.com.

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