New York Music Daily
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Soloist Sarah Koop McCoy got more than one standing ovation for her performance of Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra. With rich, woody lows, keening highs and slinky midrange, she maintained a constant intensity as conductor Matthew Aubin brought all hands on deck and kept them there. Nielsen’s music is so much fun to conduct, and play, because he keeps his ideas constantly shifting from one part of the orchestra to another. Aubin’s long association with this group shone throughout a warm, conversational rapport, notwithstanding the music’s persistent unease: Nielsen’s late-career, tentative flirtation with the Second Viennese School. Yet not everything here defied resolution – there was a nod in a samba direction, a dixieland detour, and finally one of the funniest fugues in the repertoire, played solo by McCoy with deadpan flair.
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Concertonet
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[The Nielsen Clarinet Concerto] is a work where soloist Sarah Koop McCoy and the dynamic conductor Matthew Aubin let loose with this disjointed yet ravishingly beautiful work. Ms. McCoy was never one to “rhapsodize” the piece. It is, after all, not only incredibly difficult, but its moods are impetuous and mercurial.
Ms. McCoy started with a muscular opening, vying with Mr. Aubin’s chamber group, yet within hardly a minute–after Scott Still’s snare-drum tattoos–with a breathless cadenza. It was faultless, her breath control was to be envied (from this one-time licorice player), and one was in for a romping non-structural party. Like Mozart, Nielsen saved this masterpiece for the end of his life, and one thinks that Mozart would have loved the series of unexpected turns, the use of his favorite instrument, and Ms. McCoy’s artistry in the blasts on high and the undertows at the end. |
The Chelsea Symphony’s performance in the vast downstairs oceanically-themed space at the American Museum of Natural History on the 22nd of this month might well turn out to have been this year’s most epic, intense, mightily enveloping concert.
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