“Inventive met traditional at the Tacoma Symphony concert Sunday in the Pantages Theater,” writes Rosemary Ponnekanti in Monday’s (11/23) News Tribune (Tacoma, WA). Music Director Sarah Ioannides led a program that included “a United States premiere by Portuguese composer Luis Tinoco that scattered musicians throughout the theater and the highly conventional ‘Reformation’ symphony of Mendelssohn, while violin soloist Caroline Goulding injected the 112-year-old Sibelius concerto with imaginative sound…. ‘Before Spring,’ a 2013 piece written as a commission to play as prelude to Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring,’ showed Tinoco as both a thoughtful and communicative composer. A recorded speech by the composer was followed by a 10-minute work that reworked Stravinsky’s language into a dreamy, cinematic landscape. Long tone clusters, exposed oboe, hovering flutes and staccato piano all nodded to the great work while creating another. Finally, with almost all the wind and brass section playing from throughout the auditorium, the piece surrounded the audience in a crescendoing cloud of discord—only to end with that iconic high C on bassoon, hinting at the masterpiece to come. The awed audience member who uttered a solo ‘Whoa!’ after the baton dropped summed it up for all of us.”
Posted December 1, 2015
