You know the piccolo. It's the sound in the stratosphere, the instrument you notice only for its distance from everything else. You don't hear its actual tone so much as you hear its suggestion of military marches or — what else but? — birds.
At Friday night's Metro Collection concert, Ann Choomack, flute and piccolo player with the Richmond Symphony, gave the audience a chance to hear the instrument in its own right with a performance of Vivaldi's Concerto in C Major for piccolo and orchestra. Steven Smith conducted.
Vivaldi's piece is like a ring box with fluff swathing the jewel in the middle. The fast outer movements, full of runs and arpeggios for the soloist, are pleasing, but the lyrical middle movement let Choomack show off the pure tone and versatile phrasing of which a well-played piccolo is capable.
In this work and the first on the program, a set of Purcell's "Fantasias," the lower strings were almost too prominent, occasionally weighing down the sound of the violins.
The first half of the program closed with Respighi's "Gli ucelli" ("The Birds,") a work that gives instrumental glimpses into the avian world, all handsome, some more literal than others.
The second movement, "The Dove," passes melodies all around the orchestra, evoking bird talk without being merely imitative. The musicians played with sensitivity not just to their own lines but to those that came before and after, creating transitions as seamless as twilight.
"The Hen," on the other hand, is a musical portrait of a bird pecking and fluttering in bursts of absurd aggression. Smith found an artful balance between a demure, paint-by-number approximation and a gritty documentary of a chicken shed.
The title of this Metro Collection is "Colors." You're free to imagine your own literal colors throughout the concert — they'll probably cluster toward the warm end of the spectrum — but the works were chosen to address the concept of timbre, the sound-equivalent of color. As such, the last two pieces on the program present a fascinating contrast.
Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante defunte" ("Pavane for a Dead Princess") is rich with soft tones and long phrases. Smith's interpretation was more languidly elegant than emotionally charged.
Many of the variations in "Variaciones Concertantes," written in 1953 by Ginastera, whittle away instruments to reveal timbre combinations in intertwining melodic lines that are quietly but deeply satisfying. The crowning jewel (not Vivaldi's solitaire) was the bass and harp duet of the penultimate variation, played by Paul Bedell and Lynette Wardle. Structurally, the work cycles through tension-building and release, shaped by Smith to create a feeling of floating rather than dropping. The final variation joins everyone in a rhythmically driving celebration of musical color.
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