At a recent Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert, Music Director Jaime Martín and pianist Fazil Say. Photo by Bonnie Perkinson.
In Friday’s (2/20) Classical Voice North America, Richard S. Ginell writes, “The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra … has a long-running program of new-music commissions called Sound Investment, which … has produced 25 new compositions. So when the world premiere of a Beal-Fund-commissioned piece by Michael Abel had to be postponed, LACO … slipped an earlier Sound Investment commission, Gernot Wolfgang’s Desert Wind,” into a February 14 concert led by Music Director Jaime Martín. “The nearly 16-minute piece holds up as a busy, eclectic portrait of Los Angeles, traffic and all, occasionally swept by the Santa Ana winds … There is a Hollywood-style opening that quickly segues into an auto trip on Wilshire Boulevard, with a jazz rhythm section grooving away…. The rest of the concert found Martín and the LACO laying down a fast, responsive, absolutely together carpet for the unique Turkish pianist-composer Fazil Say … The vehicle was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, in which the first movement barreled along at a chipper pace, at times brusquely, until Say got around to a cadenza of his own, which he calls his Op. 10. That cadenza was high drama all the way.” Also on the program was “Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite, taken by Martín … with sweeping phrasings and a good sense of flow.”
