Conductor Debuts with Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra

<>i>Milton Moore, The Day - Toshiyuki Shimada is a perfect fit for the orchestra and audience.

Sep 28, 2009 2:37 PM - Toshiyuki Shimada did not disappoint. The ovation was long and strong at the Garde Arts Center Saturday when he simply showed his face on stage, and the new music director of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, so winning in his tryout here a year ago, once again charmed the audience with his wit and delighted them with his music-making.

From the long lyrical spans of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to the rapid-fire metric complexities of Bernstein's Overture to "Candide," Shimada proved a perfect fit, revealing talents of the ECSO ensemble and principals seldom heard before. He led an intentionally tuneful, crowd-pleasing program that thoroughly pleased the near-sell-out crowd.
An assistant professor of conducting at Yale and music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Shimada began the evening with a brief statement of appreciation at his selection from a group of six finalists to replace Xiao-Lu Li, who led the ECSO for a decade. Shimada gestured to the audience as he said, "We are now starting, all together, our collaboration."

He had programmed what he called "a pop-sy concert … You will be saying, "I know this tune.’" He opened with Rossini's Overture to "William Tell," a television staple from "Loony Tunes" to "The Lone Ranger," to prove his point.

Sharing the spotlight with Shimada were many of the orchestra's principals: new cello principal, the 25-year-old Romanian-born Mihai Marica, whose obbligatos and very presence seem to have transformed a crucial section; oboist Anne Megan; trumpet principal Julia Clark; and above all, clarinet principal Kelli O'Connor, who along with Clark had a ball wandering off the charts in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

From cellist Marica's opening of the Rossini overture and the unexpected pleasures of the singing operatic voice in the cello section, the orchestra played superbly for Shimada - and seemed to know it. There were smiles everywhere.

Shimada appears immune to performance pressure; he radiated a sense of ease and comfort fronting the 80-plus musicians. He is active in his cuing, attentive with the baton when called for and physically dynamic without seeming showy. He did flash some moments of showmanship, pantomiming a rider during the galloping rhythms of the hoe-down in Copland's "Rodeo." After the applause, he said to the audience, "You have never seen a Japanese cowboy before, have you?" He had the audience howling with his demonstration of his Texas/Japanese accent, acquired during his five years with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.
During the lyrical and emotive Schubert, a few audience members clapped after the first movement, and Shimada turned to hush them. Afterward, he explained he felt clapping between movements breaks the flow of the composition, and at the end of the first movement of the four-movement Copland, when a smattering of applause rippled, he turned with a sly smile and waved four fingers.

But, as in his tryout here, it was the response of the musicians that was most dramatic. Once again, Shimada gave this orchestra a new sound, more transparent to reveal all of the voices and more sectionally balanced. He is skillful in the shaping of dynamics, mastering the acoustic challenges of the hall, and has a keen sense of harmonic structure that reaches across many measures, even in episodic works like the Rossini and Copland.
In the Rossini, it was the nuances of the slow passages that were a revelation, no longer mere connective tissue. And in the Schubert, he carried the long singing melodies to the dark and bitter outbursts that punctuate the developments as if these long harmonic journeys were inevitable. The Bernstein overture, with its crazy 3/2 meters and tumble-down-the-stairs phrasings, was a cheerful romp, propelled by five percussionists, and Shimada was grinning broadly through much of it.

The scripted program ended with pianist Jeffrey Biegel soloing in "Rhapsody in Blue" - "the United Airlines theme," as Shimada put it. Biegel gave the solos a surprising intimacy, a sense of a jazzman's musings late at night in a saloon, and the orchestra played with jazzy freedom in the solos.

By that point, Shimada had his audience so at ease that during the encore of "Stars and Stripes Forever" (a tip of the cap to Arthur Fiedler), the audience not only clapped in time, there were scattered pockets of sing-alongs of the grade school version: "Be kind to our fine feathered friends …"

Shimada seems a perfect fit for this orchestra and audience. On the podium, he appears both a peer of the musicians before him and a soloist playing this orchestra like a keyboard. And he is just plain likable, sort of equal parts Leonard Bernstein (with whom he studied) in his air of command, and Victor Borge, with his dry and ready humor.

The audience arrived early, many coming from a black-tie fundraiser across the street at the Thames Club, and stayed late, for sweets and champagne in the lobby. Thanks to Shimada's debut performance, the ECSO should expect many return customers.