In the 1993 film "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray learns to play Rachmaninoff. Doomed to repeat an identical day again and again until he gets it right, Murray's grouchy weatherman eventually works up to the 18th variation of Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," which he uses, successfully, to impress a girl.
It's a good thing Murray's love interest hadn't heard pianist Katherine Chi, who, soloing with the Richmond Symphony, gave the most incisive performance the Carpenter Theatre has seen this season.
Rachmaninoff's rhapsody is dizzy and insouciant; the composer runs rings around Paganini's theme, skittering from darkness to light and back.
Appropriately daring, Chi alternately harangued, then implored, then joshed the orchestra, all with a technical ferocity a TV weatherman could never, in another hundred Groundhog Days, hope to match.
Chi's Rachmaninoff wasn't Saturday's only cinematic moment. As if in a nod to Super Bowl Sunday, the symphony offered up tune after indelible tune, the kind featured prominently in movies, ringtones and commercials for Windows 7.
You know these melodies. They're insistent, persistent, salable. What you may not know is their context, the complex musical ecosystems from which they sprang. Fortunately, the Richmond Symphony was happy to introduce you.
Guest conductor Danail Rachev led an energetic performance of Edvard Grieg's "Suite No. 1 from Peer Gynt," snippets of which have been used to sell you hamburgers, cellphones and snacks. The orchestra did some selling of its own, playing with an extroverted zeal that more than made up for occasional lapses of control.
Less wheeling and dealing took place in the evening's final offering, Sibelius' expansive Symphony No. 5, fragments of which have made their way into pop songs and musicals.
Sibelius, writing in his later years from his forest retreat at Ainola, Finland, conjures a buzzing, bustling musical landscape through which various themes lumber or snort or flap.
It was movie music without the movie, rich with background, replete with character.
The orchestra wandered contentedly through Sibelius' boreal soundscape. Violins burbled; basses growled. Winds trekked forward, one note off-kilter from the strings.
A soaring theme inspired by Sibelius' encounter with a flock of swans came off as a trifle leaden-winged, but the orchestra's final six surprising, strung-out chords lit up the silence between them.
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