Carmel Symphony brightly opens 2023-24 without six-season music director

My interest was piqued to make a rare visit to the Carmel Symphony Orchestra by the strength of the program and getting to experience it on the cusp of a transition. 

Janna Hymes has just resigned the music directorship to accept a position in Sedona, Arizona, with that city's symphony orchestra, whose season opens a week from today. 

On Saturday at the Palladium, the Carmel Symphony opened its season with a guest conductor on the program, a notable rarity. David Commanday, a widely experienced conductor-cellist based in Illinois, conducted the orchestra in music by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Korean-born composer Caroline Kyunga Ahn, a professor at Anderson University commissioned to write for the CSO.

"Take Me Home Clouds, Take Me..." is the Carmel resident's musical response to an unsettling episode of "horrible airplane turbulence" on her return from a family vacation. The unusual style of the title, part of a series Ahn is composing, reflects the incompleteness and the homeward longing often associated with travel.

David Commanday helped the orchestra enter a new era.

About 11 minutes long, the work conveys the upset as well as what might well have been Ahn's attempts to calm her nerves and regularize her heartbeat. The latter tactic gets represented by a minimalist foray spotlighting the winds in intricate, repetitive rhythmic interplay. In contrast, episodes of unresolvable dissonance convey the frightening onset and return of the turbulence. 

There's considerable work for two percussionists to do on woodblocks and marimba, supplemented and made spatially interesting by the double basses tapping on their instruments from the other side of the orchestra. A chorale-like passage poised against persistent string tremolos summarizes the emotional tension between fear and the dogged certainty that all will end well. It amounted to a resourceful piece of ensemble writing performed with evident confidence.

At intermission, Commanday spoke briefly to the audience, commending its silence in the first half and preparing it to hear the Beethoven Seventh Symphony with fresh ears. He emphasized three of its four movements putting a dance feeling foremost, while the second-movement Allegretto he labeled a sort of elegy. I read somewhere that this rather stately contrast to the other three registered, perhaps not so surprisingly, with its first audience so strongly that there was an immediate demand for it to be encored.

The Carmel performance was in good shape throughout. Some first-movement insecurity in the horns was righted subsequently. There was a worthwhile patience in Commanday's working through the slow introduction to set up the first of those dance celebrations appropriately. After the beautifully regulated second movement, the third leapt into effervescence from the start. Especially notable was the sturdy, strong presentation of the Trio section — the start of which is teasingly returned just before brisk interruption by the final cadence. 

The finale was full of those hints of abandon that fortunately never took over. The sound of this hall benefited from attention to detail, making it clear that Beethoven had a workmanlike attitude toward his sweeping inspiration: I loved the clarity of that grinding figure in the double basses at the movement's climax. This performance was worthy of the advances in professionalism the Carmel Symphony made under the direction of the just-departed Hymes, who received due credit in executive director Anne Marie Chastain's opening remarks.

Soloist Martinez: Attractive account of Mozart

Another undeniable masterpiece, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, was in good hands with soloist Gabriela Martinez.  A Venezuelan of notable success in major competitions, Martinez has used those laurels as a springboard to a richly varied career. Her playing Saturday night was loaded with brio and a touch of showmanship: Her gaze often went heavenward, but not distractingly. 

More of a possible theatrical touch was the way she swept off her light shawl just before the first-movement cadenza. It could have been that she was just warm in the moment; maybe it's something she always does with an extra, temporarily discardable layer of clothing in  playing this piece. Who can blame her when the cadenza is so forward-looking, stormy and heavily pedaled? Given the romantic-harbinger status of this concerto, her cadenza was by no means unidiomatic.

Her touch throughout was assertive, but lyrical enough in the second movement. In the first, she showed off left-hand accents with a rich but never bangy tone. The accompaniment repaid her efforts handsomely. The flow of the finale was stressed more than its spikiness, an interpretive choice that suits the way the prevailing minor mode yields sunnily toward the conclusion. It could have signaled bright prospects for the Carmel Symphony as it searches for a new music director.