Curtis musicians bring the sound of renewal to Verizon

With its recent tumult of labor strife and money woes, the Kimmel Center seems an unlikely site to stage a musical spring. Yet there it was last weekend, the irrepressible stirring of renewal.

At Saturday morning's first Philadelphia Orchestra family concert this year, cellist John-Henry Crawford, 18, a Curtis student and winner in the orchestra's Albert M. Greenfield Student Competition, projected polished charisma and a singing sound in the first movement of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto.

His was only one voice among a hundred the next afternoon at the season's first outing of the Curtis Institute of Music orchestra beyond its luxurious new tailor-built rehearsal room. The ensemble was sturdy and promising, but wisps of optimism could be traced to the performance space itself. Verizon Hall, the subject of a $2 million acoustical remediation during the last two summers, can finally be judged, if only provisionally at this point in the young season. In Saturday's quick succession of works by Wagner, Grieg, Stravinsky, and Humperdinck led by Cristian Macelaru, the Philadelphia Orchestra had a sense of immediacy it never had before.

On Sunday, the Curtis orchestra's Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 under the energetic Michael Stern was an even better crucible. After an enervating start (a few cracks in the trumpet section), marvelous strokes of individuality emerged: a focused and mellow timpani sound from Yi Fei Fu, the supple shaping of solos by oboist Samuel Nemec, and a cello section of surprising depth and maturity in the second movement. The pleasantly ringing sound of piccolo player Bile Zhang in the third movement surpassed many a spin through the same passages by professional counterparts.

The membership of this orchestra of course changes from year to year, but with youth always comes a certain brightness - more so on this occasion. It wasn't clear to me in the Tchaikovsky, or in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, that the orchestra could hear itself better than before, one of the goals of the acoustic project. From the other side of the footlights, however, the double-bass section (on the highest level of risers, behind the first violins) glowed with a discernible presence. The symphony's famous pizzicato movement had both clarity and warmth.