ESO salutes 'Exiles in Hollywood,' Strauss
The Elgin Symphony Orchestra's sixth annual spring festival, "Exiles in Hollywood," wraps up this weekend at the Hemmens Theatre with music Director Robert Hanson conducting concert works by well-known European émigré film composers Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
The concert's centerpiece is Korngold's Violin Concerto in D Major (1945), one of the few concert works he composed in Hollywood after moving there in 1934. Korngold, a child prodigy who some called "another Mozart," vacated Europe as colleagues Rozsa and Waxman did in order to avoid Nazi persecution.
The ESO is fortunate to have California native Jennifer Frautschi as a violin soloist for Korngold's tuneful concerto, originally written for the great violinist Jascha Heifetz.
Frautschi, in addition to the standard repertoire concertos by Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and others, has found something of a niche playing mid- to late-20th century pieces. Her performance in Friday's matinee concert demonstrated a depth of understanding of Korngold's sophisticated writing in the first two movements. Later, she let it all hang out in the fast-paced finale, reportedly written by Korngold to show off Heifetz's technical wizardry.
Hanson conducted two other examples of concert-hall music by well-known film composers, the brief and brassy "Overture to a Symphony Concert" by Rozsa, which includes elements of Rozsa's Roman-epic film scores from the 1950s, along with an elegiac Hungarian folk melody in its slow section.
The other work on the program is the seldom-heard "Sinfonietta for Strings and Timpani," written by Waxman in Hollywood in 1955.
Between them, Rozsa and Waxman won five Academy Awards - three for Rozsa and two for Waxman.
To complete this weekend's program, Hanson has chosen music not by a film composer, but by Richard Strauss, one of the great late-romantic German opera composers.
The reason? Strauss was one of the greatest musical influences on the numerous émigré composers who settled in Hollywood. The suite from "Der Rosenkavalier' contains some of Strauss' most accessible and tuneful music, with its famous waltzes at the core. Hanson and his orchestra - impressive work by the brass - played this music like they owned it.