At the South Carolina Philharmonic’s April 24 “Shadow and Light” concert, the orchestra’s management announced that Maestro Morihiko Nakahara had been offered, and accepted, a new contract that will take him through the 2014-15 season. This is good news for Columbia music lovers, as Morihiko has rapidly taken this orchestra to a higher level — and mostly with the same personnel and a similar budget.

How did he do it? My guess is with old-fashioned musical expertise and bold musical choices.

Take Saturday night’s big orchestral pieces, Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman overture and Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor. Both were raging good performances, with much the same ensemble that played so blandly at the Koger Center just a few years ago.
 

Martina Filjak

Considering strings first, Morihiko knows that 10 first violins aren’t enough, but now that he has them playing much better in tune, they sound like a dozen. And now that they are bowing with unified style and articulation, they can sound like even more.

And now they do, to their credit and his, at least when playing at a maximum level of intensity.

The same is true of the other string sections; they now hold up pretty well to the full-sized woodwind, brass and percussion sections one is obliged to put on stage. So, if you haven’t heard this vastly improved ensemble in a while, you owe it to yourself to give them a listen.

But there is a bigger musical picture. The Dutchman sounded very bright and brassy; but is it part of the “Shadow” or the “Light?” The libretto is about a stern Dutchman who is allowed on land only every seven years to search for a faithful woman. The story only gets spookier. It ends with his love, found at last, flinging herself to death in a Norwegian fjord as the Dutchman’s ship sinks to the bottom. Is this happiness or tragedy, “Shadow” or “Light”? Just what orchestral sound is appropriate?

The Dvorak is more obvious — more brawny than brassy, due to orchestrations that tend to emphasize strings and woodwinds. Here, Morihiko got it just right: lively, infectious tempos with lots of variety in energy and dynamics.

What an improvement! But wait, there’s more: One of the best soloists we’ve had in a long time, Martina Filjak, produced an airy, delicate reading of Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto with a truly virtuosic finale. The Third concerto is much happier than the others, even though Bartók was in his last days and did not live to complete its final measures. It was a heavenly performance, with Morihiko working hard to keep balance in check. I guess this was the truly “Light” part of the concert’s title.

The cavernous Koger Center contributes little resonance to the instruments’ natural qualities, so when you title a program “Shadow and Light,” how do you make the difference in terms of actual sound, not just relying on the difference in the moods of the music?
Here, Wagner’s bombastic brass and howling strings were hardly dark music, but instead were brilliant and gleaming with horn sounds blasting off the back wall only inches away, trumpets and low brass just as shiny and bright, nestled as they were in the back stage left corner. There’s nothing wrong with brilliant and gleaming, but if this is “Shadow” music, it was anything but shadowy in terms of actual sound.

And the Seventh Symphony, which is unusually dark for Dvorak, opening with surly, brooding violas and cellos, somber atmospheres throughout — even the lively Furiant-scherzo is angry and moody — how do you get these consistently bright sounds to match the true, darker texture of the music?

This will be only one challenge as this gifted conductor strives to grow his orchestra into a more sophisticated ensemble. If he maintains the same personnel (no additional strings), he might have to experiment with the orchestra setup to meet the sonic demands of the music.

As next season’s programs are again titled with contrasting concepts (“Song and Dance,” “Fantasies and Dreams,” even “Heaven and Earth”), Maestro Nakahara will again be faced with difficult musical decisions dictated by the hall he and his musicians must work within.
Not everything should sound the same.