A hypothetical Bay Area music lover with a particularly tenacious memory might recall cellist Nathan Chan from his days as ateen soloistwith the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (or, even further back, from hisdazzling TV cameoat age 11, playing Saint-Saëns). Nowadays, the Hillsborough native is a full-grown member of the Seattle Symphony, and he came home to perform with the California Symphony on Saturday, May 14.
It was a triumph.
Playing Elgar’s wonderfully moody and eloquent Cello Concerto in the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek — the first of two performances in collaboration with the orchestra and Music Director Donato Cabrera — Chan revealed both a profound technical gift and an expressive directness that many a better-known virtuoso could only envy. His string tone is rich and dark-hued, his intonation is fearlessly precise, and his mastery of musical narrative unfolds with unerring clarity.
All of these virtues, moreover, were put to the service of a showpiece that really should be a more regular part of our musical life. Elgar wrote the concerto in 1919, and although he lived another 15 years, it was the last major work he completed.
What’s remarkable about the score is the way it combines the sweeping gestures and communicative urgency of late Romanticism with a sort of no-nonsense compactness. “There is much to think and feel here,” the music says, “but let’s not dwell on it to excess.”
Cabrera has a knack for this distinctively English sentiment, as he showed in opening the orchestra’s season in September withVaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony. Together, he and Chan brought out both the urgency and the emotional reserve of Elgar’s writing.
That meant lending a full measure of rhythmic verve to the comparatively broad stretches of the opening movement (the first of four), and delivering the ensuing scherzo with vivid wit and bravura. Most of all, perhaps, it meant shaping the concerto’s luminous slow movement with the combination of tenderness and dry-eyed briskness it needs.
Throughout the performance, Chan breezily faced down the concerto’s technical demands, and brought sumptuous tonal beauty to each and every phrase. As an encore, he delivered Mark Summer’s delightfully pop-tinged “Julie-O.”
Even without Chan’s contributions, this final program of the season was full of delights. It marked the arrival of Viet Cuong, the orchestra’s new Young American Composer-in-Residence, whose short curtain-raiser for string orchestra, “Next Week’s Trees,” combined Philip Glass’ harmonies with a punchy, unpredictable rhythmic palette.
The evening concluded with a superb account of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, full of radiance and graced by a truly magnificent horn solo — firm, pliable and clear-eyed — from principal Meredith Brown. Walnut Creek has a genuine civic treasure with this orchestra.
California Symphony:4 p.m. Sunday, May 15. $44-$74. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. 925-943-7469.www.californiasymphony.org