HRO Goes Back to the Future

Despite being steeped in two centuries’ worth of tradition and history, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra has adapted to its new leadership with surprising musical ease. Federico Cortese’s debut concert with HRO on Saturday night featured an ambitious program of Berlioz, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky; its success confirmed that the departure of longtime music director Dr. James Yannatos has not compromised the musical and technical standards of the ensemble.

A crowded house welcomed Cortese as he opened the concert with Hector Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival,” the same overture that James Levine selected to jumpstart the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) current season. The formidable musical benchmark the BSO set just last month, however, hardly deterred the best of Harvard’s instrumentalists from delivering a comparable rendition.

The Italian saltarello-inspired exposition pulsed with animation and drive, transitioning seamlessly into a tonally exquisite English horn solo. A few flubbed French horn entrances and a high strings section that occasionally tended to overpower its lower counterparts did little to detract from the ensemble’s procession towards an energetic, brass-heavy coda.

Members of the Radcliffe Choral Society and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum joined HRO members onstage for “Nocturnes,” Claude Debussy’s electrifying trio of symphonic poems. Debussy’s orchestration plays with texture and tone just as impressionist painters manipulate light and color, and the ensemble demonstrated a remarkable talent for this tonal experimentation. From the mystic wind and high string introduction to offbeat trills and pizzicato sequences in the second movement, the orchestra adeptly drifted in and out of various keys and tonalities without losing its crucial sense of rhythmic grounding.

The instrumental use of female voices in the third movement complemented the ebb and flow of orchestral sound, adding yet another textural layer to existing pentatonic harmonies. The tonal color of the choir was concentrated in the high sopranos, whose vocalizations meshed seamlessly with the full orchestra to personify a tempestuous sea.

Cortese rounded out the night’s program with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 5,” a romantic classic valued for both its grand scale and its lyrical nuance. In the first movement, a muted clarinet stated a brooding motif that was to be reintroduced frequently throughout the piece. A lilting second theme showcased the ensemble’s nuanced sense of musical line, though its dynamic palette leaned to the conservative side. The high strings led the vibrant third movement waltz with a perfect dose of rhythmic momentum, propelling the orchestra into a finale whose measured, yet stirring, execution never came close to risking the melodramatic.

Arriving on the coattails of one of Harvard’s longest serving music directors is a formidable challenge, to say the least, but Cortese already seems to have established a musical rapport with the orchestra—a relationship that became evident during Saturday night’s performance. Given the ensemble’s remarkable responsiveness to Cortese’s blend of unbending precision and interpretive plasticity, one can only imagine the degree of artistic cohesion HRO may realize after a few more years under Cortese’s guidance.

—Staff writer Monica S. Liu can be reached at msliu@fas.harvard.edu.