Peninsula Symphony puts on exciting show

Guest pianist Natasha Paremski was primarily responsible for generating an exciting show. She showed herself a master of the detached, angular style that makes Prokofiev’s piano work so distinctive. She pounded powerful chords with full heft, but when the opportunity arose to play soft flowing liquid runs, she could do that too.

The volunteer orchestra performed professional-level feats of keeping up with this. Its clean sound matched the piano’s precision. Conductor Mitchell Sardou Klein was particularly careful with coordinating entrances between piano and orchestra.

The concerto was composed in 1913, when Prokofiev was still a conservatory student living in imperial Russia. A long period of exile was ahead of him, to be followed by a return to what had then become Stalin’s Soviet Union. In time, Prokofiev would become an establishment figure, but in this concerto he’s still young and cheeky, a daring pianist writing complex and difficult pieces that only he could play.

Now Natasha Paremski can play them. This was an epic account well worth hearing.

After intermission, Klein took the orchestra through Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” Another Russian virtuoso pianist-composer a generation older than Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff stayed permanently in exile after the Revolution, touring as a pianist and eventually settling in Los Angeles. He was there in 1940 when he wrote this suite for orchestra, his final original composition.

Rachmaninoff’s later works, such as this, are more lean and sinewy than the luxuriant music that won him fame around the turn of the 20th century, while still being written in a Romantic idiom. The Peninsula Symphony’s interpretation crossed the difference between these periods. Klein had the orchestra tear through the fast passages at whirlwind speed, to the extent that the players’ ability to keep together and get all the notes out became a testimony to their professional skill. The first movement of the “Symphonic Dances” has the unusual tempo marking of “Non allegro” (Not fast). This was one of many performances that seem to ignore the “non” part of that.

Yet Klein also managed to slow down and milk all the lushness he could out of any lyric passages, turning them into reminiscences of such earlier works as the Second Symphony. This mixed style made for an interesting rendition.

One more brief work completed the program. Resident conductor Nathaniel Berman led the winds of the orchestra in Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture for Winds in C, Op. 24. This is a youthful work by the early Romantic composer, from about the same time as his Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his Octet for Strings. Though primarily for wind instruments — flutes, clarinets, bassoons and the like — it has enough brass and percussion to make it sound more like a march for a military band than one of Mozart’s graceful serenades for winds.

The players, tucked in the back of the stage, sounded a bit more muffled by the Heritage Theatre’s acoustics than they did in the works for full orchestra. The vigor and pliancy of their performance did come through.

Peninsula Symphony’s next program, on Jan. 20 and 21 in the same two venues, will feature guest conductor Lara Webber leading the orchestra in the First Symphony of Florence Price, a Black woman whose mid-20th century works have begun to receive deserved attention. Violinist Caroline Campbell will perform in a selection of popular favorites for violin and orchestra, including the “Carmen Fantasy” of Pablo de Sarasate.