Erin Freeman

Public radio listeners locally enjoy From the Top, a program showcasing America’s best young musicians. Every broadcast includes at least one phenomenally talented classical musician, and most of them are teenagers. Occasionally one is pre-teen. If classical music (in the words of some wags) is rapidly dying, Saturday was a day when that was not evident.

Last Saturday, the HD live broadcast of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera was sold out at Regal Sandhills Stadium 16, and the South Carolina Philharmonic was sold out at the Koger Center. Sure, it’s not tens of thousands of people watching a football game, but it’s a formidable cross-section of the public, and not to be sneezed at.

For classical music to survive, it must nurture young musicians to become performers. It is doing just that: At every turn, classical musicians are increasing in numbers and expertise, and not just in this country. It’s an amazing scene.

Saturday’s Philharmonic concert exemplified at least four aspects of increased excellence in the classical performing arts: two teenaged pianists, one young female guest conductor and one amazingly improved orchestra.

Some years ago, piano competition winners would typically present their favorite Mozart or Rachmaninoff concerto. Saturday night, we had two pianists, one 15 and the other 16 [online copy corrected], playing Prokofiev. That’s a different realm of interest than in previous generations. We had a guest conductor who was happy taking on the two pianists and adding three terrific works to fill out the program. And we had an orchestra that played impeccably throughout, a feat that simply was not possible prior to these last two seasons.

The two pianists are prizewinners of the 2009 Arthur Fraser International Concerto Competition.

Baron Fenwick, age 15, a student at the North Carolina School of the Arts, took the first movement of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 into a brilliant performance. His driving rhythm, virtuosic technique, musical treatment and careful attention to the ensemble were all stunning. Put two or three more years on this young man, and we might well have a major star.

That doesn’t slight the abilities of Joseph Mohan, age 16, a student from near Buffalo, N.Y. [online copy corrected] studying in Rochester. Mohan played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work that has the distinction of being in “one movement.” Actually, the work is more a pastiche of small movements, demanding several changes of mood and dynamics, all handled by Mohan with clarity, acuity, intense musicality and extraordinary technique.

This column has commented before that it is a healthy thing for an orchestra, even a civic orchestra (meaning no one makes his/her living playing in it), to have a guest conductor every year. Erin Freeman, associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony, has a clean conducting technique and a keen knowledge of the scores she conducts. What Philharmonic conductor Morihiko Nakahara has done with the expertise of the strings paid off in virtually the entire program. It was really good for the Philharmonic to react to a different conductor and a have chance to show its strength of character. And it was indeed strong.

Especially in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, the excellence of the strings in the fast passages was impeccable, and the balances with winds made the performance sound more like a full-time professional orchestra. We can, and we must, credit all that to the superb work Nakahara has done the last season-and-a-half. We have to be very proud that such excellence has come forth.  

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