News Blog

News Blog

Musical Invention and Virtuoso Triumph

By Sara Rubin and Walter Ryce

A packed audience at Sunset Center on Monday heard a world premiere symphony by a young, rising talent in composer Gabrielle Haigh, a native of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and currently studying Greek and Latin classics at Cambridge University. The third concert of the Monterey Symphony season featured the world premiere of Haigh's Symphony No. 1, composed when she was not yet able to legally vote.

Now a seasoned 19-year-old, Haigh was 17 when she composed the symphony, which garnered her two Broadcast Music, Inc. Student Composer awards.

Standing before a nearly full house, with Max Bragado-Darman's  orchestra at the ready, Haigh spoke to the audience in a pre-concert presentation about the work, which was inspired by Ayn Rand. The work was vocative of the individual struggle against power structures (in this case greedy politicians), telling the story of a "despondent" inventor who seeks shelter from a corrupt society in the redemption of work and creation.

Filled with a series of representational motifs—children laughing and teasing, teens with newly cracked voices (re-created by plodding bassoons), an ambulance, industrial machinery, and "gusts of cold wind" buffeting the walking protagonist (played by
an unusual and compelling woodwind/percussion conversation)—the symphony is a linear, character-based narrative, which was much informed by Haigh's pre-concert talk and the guidance of the program notes.

That narrative played out in animated, creative use of instrumentation, as if the woodwinds, brass, stings and percussion were engaged in a lively group discussion. The sum of the intricate parts of this impressive first symphonic work adds up to a complex, playful (though sometimes brooding), cohesive, auspicious and powerful debut. And an appreciative and loudly cheering Sunset audience probably wouldn't disagree. You will hear from this phenom again.

In a remarkably bold yet precise performance for the second part of the program, pianist Josu De Solaun played the solo for Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3 in D Minor. A sweeping piece that requires endurance for its 45 minutes of quick tempo with barely a pause for De Solaun, his sustained performance held up to the massive concerto, featured in the movie Shine starring Geoffrey Rush as pianist David Helfgott, in which the piece pushes Rush's character to the brink of madness.

Remarkably engaging for such a long piano concerto, the piece crescendos frequently with a series of false summits, drawing the audience--and the soloist--forward to its climatic coda.

De Solaun, a native of Valencia, Spain, has performed in Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Leipzig's Schuman Haus, and Prague's Nostitz Palace among other venues. He holds his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in music from the Manhattan School of Music. But it was De Solaun who schooled the Sunset Center crowd, to the tune of a sustained standing ovation. It's no surprise that the piece, according to the program notes by Louise Cuyler, is "among the all time favorites of both performers and audiences."

After such a musical feast, a fine finish came in the form of silky temperanillo and crisp white wine and tapas at a dimly lit but warmly atmospheric Mundaka, where our gregarious host/server helped to stoke the residual afterglow of a Monday far from mundane.