Every year, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s concerto Winners Concert is one of the best opportunities to hear young musicians at the start of their musical careers.
The most recent edition, on Friday, Oct. 3, was no different. The concert, which was free to attend, showcased Zoe Yost tackling the solo role in Béla Bartók’s unfinished viola concerto with zeal and soprano Cristina Villalobos in Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, revealing a voice that could easily fill a room double the size of the Conservatory’s main performance hall.
The student orchestra, led by Oakland Symphony Music Director Kedrick Armstrong, kicked things off on Friday night with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s The Bamboula (Rhapsodic Dance). Kudos to the percussion and lower brass sections for playing with enthusiasm throughout, and to clarinetist Ben Taylor and oboist Gabriel Chodos, who played fine solos during the calm middle section.
Coleridge-Taylor, a British composer of African heritage, wrote the piece in 1911, just one year before he died from pneumonia at the age of 37. The 11-minute dance is the expanded version of a short piece he’d included in his piano collection “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies” (1905), which culled from African and West Indian tunes and African-American spirituals. (“Bamboula” refers to both an African drum made from a rum barrel and a dance that enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean and the Americas.)
Overall, it’s a charming piece, and I wouldn’t mind if more professional American orchestras put it on their programs. But the music’s lighthearted character made it a somewhat puzzling choice as a curtain-raiser for the Bartók concerto and the Berlioz song cycle.
Zoe Yost, a third-year undergraduate student from Delaware studying viola and composition, took the stage for the concerto. She attacked all the challenging double-stop passages and tricky shifts with youthful fearlessness. With her willingness to take musical risks, there came the occasional intonation slip in the viola’s higher register, but a compelling and daring live performance with small slips is much better listening than one that is technically flawless while playing it safe.
Bartók died of leukemia before he could complete the concerto, which has now cemented itself in the solo viola repertoire. Of the completions available, Yost opted for the version finished by the violist Tibor Serly, Bartók’s former student, using what little information was contained in Bartók’s sketches.
Yost was great at showing off the viola’s vast range; some of the most satisfying parts of her performance came when she dug deep into the string to bring out a gritty, guttural sound (sometimes followed immediately by a gentle phrase).
In the second half of the program, Utah-raised soprano Cristina Villalobos joined the orchestra for Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, a six-song cycle exploring themes of love and loss that draws its text from poetry by Théophile Gautier. Berlioz orchestrated this piece, originally written for voice and piano, around the time when his first marriage was dying and he began an affair with the opera singer Marie Recio, whom he would eventually marry.
Although there were some initial balance issues, Villalobos was fully settled onstage by the second song, “Le spectre de la rose,” which she sang with sensitivity, warmth, and passion. Her delivery of the next three songs, “Sur les lagunes,” “Absence,” and “Au Cimetière: Clair de lune,” was spot-on, perfectly striking a balance between longing and sorrow. My only slight quibble was that a few phrases were cut short. The sixth and final song, “L’Île inconnue” was yet another perspective on love, and her interpretation was bright, playful, and a little flirty.
Keep an eye on Villalobos, who finished her master’s at the Conservatory earlier this year already shows many qualities of a rising opera star.
