Tucson Symphony opens Gomez’s 10th year with violin prodigy

It’s an exhausting, technically-challenging beast that tests the soloist’s stamina and skill.

Usually the soloist is a seasoned player, someone who has been around the block a time or two with the work.

In only her second time performing the work in concert on Friday night, 18-year-old rising star violinist Amaryn Olmeda met the Russian composer’s hairpin twists and turns and crazy fast spurts that came to sudden stops in a performance with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra that belied her age and experience.

Olmeda, a sophomore at the New England Conservatory of Music and a rising star in the violin world, looked every bit the part of a seasoned performer, walking confidently onto the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall stage in a floor-length flowered blue gown, holding her rare 1796 Nicola Bergonzi violin.

Her breathless, emotionally expressive performance was the centerpiece of the opening concert of Music Director José Luis Gomez’s 10th season in Tucson. For those 30 plus-minutes, Olmeda invited us to experience the next generation of violin greats as she navigated everything Tchaikovsky threw at her.

She leaned into the work’s seemingly straightforward scalar passages that disguised changing rhythms and complex fingering that took the music from zero to 60 with no wiggle room for miscues.

Olmeda didn’t seem to break a sweat even during the behemoth opening solo cadenza with its rapid arpeggios and stops and starts, and again in the dauntingly tricky Allegro vivacissimo finale, a Russian folk song on steroids. Even after 25 minutes of non-stop playing, Olmeda made Tchaikovsky’s virtuosic workout look effortless as she scaled the allegro’s rapid fingering shifts and equally rapid-fired bowing.

Her performance, the first of two concerts she will perform as the TSO’s artist-in-residence and her Arizona debut, earned her a rousing standing ovation and a pair of curtain calls before she returned for an encore.

The concerto was the centerpiece of “Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto,” the opening concert of Music Director José Luis Gomez’s 10th season in Tucson. Gomez bookended the concerto with Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s dynamic overture “Sensemaa” that conjured native rituals with driving rhythms and explosive percussive energy, and Strauss’s epic orchestral showpiece “Ein Heldenleben” (A Hero’s Life) in the orchestra’s first performance of the work since 2012.

Gomez emphasized the varying moods and shades as the single movement unfolded into six parts spread over 40 minutes.

He added cinematic sweep to the opening “Hero” passage and stirring dissonance from the woodwinds to create the tension in “The Hero’s Adversaries” segment meant to mock the composer’s critics.

Associate Concertmaster Ludek Wojtkowski — subbing in the now vacant concertmaster seat after Jesús Linárez left at the end of last season — added emotional depth and warmth to the extended solo in ”The Hero’s Companion,” a nod to Strauss’s wife Pauline.

Gomez reintroduced fiery confusion in “The Hero at Battle,” a scorching romp that felt like a fist fight had broken out all over the place. Drums battled to outwit one another with a steady barrage of melodic thumping as off-stage trumpets blared nationalistic fanfares and a wall of eight French horns — played magnificently — tried to cut through the confusion.

Gomez turned the segment into the perfect storm of chaos in line with Strauss’s intention that the passage serve as the collision of the hero and his naysayers.

After all that crazy, Gomez brought a sense of calm and serenity to the final two segments, including “The Hero's Retirement from this World,” a minutes-long reflection that included the peaceful solemnity of twin harps against a backdrop of blaring horns before Gomez and the orchestra went silent.

For several moments, the audience followed the conductor and players’ lead and remained pin-drop quiet until Gomez raised his head and turned to face them.

The orchestra repeats the concert at Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., at 2 p.m. Sunday. Visit tucsonsymphony.org for tickets.

Olmeda rounds out her artist-in-residence Dec. 12-13 with a pair of chamber concerts at Tucson Symphony Center, 2175 N. Sixth Ave.