Tulsa Symphony Orchestra
Oct. 7, 2023
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
If you weren’t at the fair last Saturday night, you should’ve been at the symphony. Tulsa Symphony Orchestra marketed this as a Halloween Masquerade show, and I saw a mime, a cheetah, and a brilliantly bedazzled masked dude in heels. There were plenty of normies, myself included, but I appreciated the few who really showed out. On the bill (and maybe a little incongruously, considering the masquerade thing) was war music of the 1940s: composers from Britain, America, Armenia, and Russia who were all working against the backdrop of World War II.
The emotional heavyweight of the show was guest soprano Janinah Burnett’s performance in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Burnett complemented her powerful singing with an energetic attention to the crowd, smiling, cringing, and laughing through the James Agee text about American childhood and the horror of mortality. I saw one person crying, and I doubt that there was only one.
The orchestra performed the hell out of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, and I should have liked it, but didn’t. I don’t get Shostakovich; it’s a personal failing (I’m working on it). For me, disregarding the high quality of TSO’s performance, the composition is obnoxiously inconsistent.
But then, he wrote it that way. Originally intended to be a celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis, Shostakovich instead wrote a blackly humorous, intentionally bouncy and strange piece that eschewed the power and pomp expected from a victory symphony — one critic of the time called it “a light and amusing interlude between Shostakovich’s significant creations.” Even Robert S. Katz, in the liner notes for the TSO program, hilariously wrote: “What could Shostakovich have been thinking?”
Anyway, my favorite piece was Khachaturian’s Suite from Masquerade, where the theme of the night coalesced. The opening Waltz is cantankerous and fun, and the energy of it really appealed to my identity as a silly little guy. The orchestra deftly weaved through its moods from funny to ominous and back, and, as always, concertmaster and first violinist Rossitza Goza — who I do not have a crush on, stop asking — brought a tear to my eye with the solo violin section in the Nocturne.
The only thing I was truly disappointed by was the turnout: the hall was a little under three-fourths full. My optimistic ass says we should be packing every performance of our world-class orchestra. Just because I don’t like every piece of classical music ever created doesn’t mean you won’t. You can’t tell me you were all at the fair.
