The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition rose to virtuosic playoff levels of excellence fitting for a “March Madness” Sunday matinee concert.
Concerto competition winner Rebekah Hou
Don’t dismiss the athletic comparison: The touch and dexterity in performing arts skills of this trio of finalists were as evident onstage at Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center as a winning slam dunk on an NCAA championship basketball court. If not more so. All three competitors nailed it. But the deciding factor may well have been “degree of difficulty,” as is often the case in Olympic competitions, coming up again this summer in Paris.
The concerto that harpist Rebekah Hou of Cleveland performed may have won favor by the panel of three that judged her the top prize-winner of $5,000 in part because there are so few other solo concertos for that instrument in all of the repertoire of famous classical composers.
Written by the late Alberto Ginastera of Argentina in 1956, the piece – known for decades simply as the Harp Concerto – gained somewhat wider attention on the 2016 centennial of his birth. Other modern composers of harp solo concertos have emerged since. But they remain a rarity in the vast canon of classical music, making it a challenge to study or learn from other recordings.
Hou’s performance was impeccably precise though perhaps unfamiliar in timbre to even sophisticated classical music listeners who have rarely if ever heard the harp played as the leading concerto solo instrument.
The judges’ runner-up prize of $2,500 went to Alejandro Gomez Pareja of Madrid, Spain, who also won the audience popular vote prize for his emotive and explosive rendition of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, which led off Sunday’s concert program. Sophia Geng of Andover, Massachusetts, was awarded the $1,000 prize for third place by the judges for her mastery of one of the most challenging for any string instrument – Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major – which wrapped up this daunting program.
Going in order of appearance, Gomez Pereja dived into the complicated first movement that borrows on themes from Josef Stalin’s favorite folk tunes said to be distorted by Shostakovich as a jab at Soviet iron-fist fury. Attacking at first with the bow as a lance, Gomez Pereja’s weapon gave way to reflections on loss and remorse. A stirring third movement solo carried the melody all on its own before orchestral exchanges based on the opening theme – amplified by woodwind and horn clarion calls – signaled a climactic cello finish to a rousing ovation.
Hou’s concerto was announced silently before her on-stage appearance by the front and right-of-center positioning of her handsomely crafted harp. From the first notes, you know this is not your grandmother’s harp, nor Harpo Marx’s. While the usual angelic glissandos flourish from time to time in the concerto, many more sharply plucked notes are both singularly melodic in tone and percussive on impact, especially as she slapped wood panels of the harp architecture. The highest notes on the shortest upper harp strings could be mistaken for tinkling piano keys as other, more sonorous notes may strike you as that of a xylophone. Still others are as tender as lightly stroked acoustic-guitar notes. Who knew a harp could be so versatile? Rebekah Hou did.
Violinist Sophia Geng followed these two virtuoso performances with, by any measure, an exhausting performance of Tchaikovsky’s notoriously difficult – even in terms of mere stamina – of the Russian master’s Violin Concerto in D Major. If she felt intimidated, Geng didn’t show it. She was studiously serious in her approach to the challenges of the piece. Never faltering, she answered the opening orchestral crescendo with a solemn solo response that melts into a melody reinvented as a dance theme later on. In a lovely opening to a long final movement, Geng’s violin “gently weeps,” as the late George Harrison might have said – its introspective passages just that relatable.
Never mind the results: There were no losers among this grand finale trio. Judging in such a high-quality competition, as any of the judges would admit, is highly subjective. No matter who finished first or third or in between, they’re all winners as accomplished young musicians.
The trio of judges deciding the top prizes were Edward Polochick, music director of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra in Nebraska; James Kelly, executive director of the National Philharmonic Orchestra, based in suburban Maryland of Washington, D.C., and Sachi Marasugi, concertmaster of the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra and member of the violin faculty of Salisbury University.
The Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition is named for the former Washington Post executive who helped bring that national newspaper into the digital age. In retirement, she moved to Royal Oak and became an MSO board member and supporter before her death of cancer in 2015 at age 67. This is just the third Loker competition as it was not held for two years of the COVID pandemic.
ELIZABETH LOKER CONCERTO COMPETITION
Three solo finalists accompanied by the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Repper at Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center, Wye Mills, on Sunday, March 24.
Steve Parks is a retired performing arts critic now living in Easton.
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