Houston Symphony’s opening night was an odd trio: Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Strauss’ Suite from Der Rosenkavalier. With Sir Ben Kingsley as narrator, Peter and the Wolf drew some star power, but it was Rosenkavalier – epic and lush – that really offered a taste of what the symphony will offer this season.
Music director and conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada snapped open the concert with Rossini. It’s a crowd-pleasing piece of music, setting the scene for this opera semiseria, and the Symphony didn’t sell it as anything we should take very seriously. A few exposed spiccato string excerpts didn’t settle together, but Orozco-Estrada always offers some element of passion to see. Here, a third of the way in, he broke into a small waltz on the tips of his toes.
Favorite narrators in Peter and the Wolf change with each generation: I will always hear Sterling Holloway, who narrated the Disney’s 1946 film version that I watched perpetually as a child, but the many children around me at this performance will likely not forget Ben Kingsley’s performance any time soon. From the start, his voice carried a smiling joke with every word. Nothing was frightening, not even the wolf, with his unwaveringly sturdy British cadence. Introducing each instrument (“There is a duck, too”), Kingsley would turn and tilt his head in the musician’s direction. He watched Orozco-Estrada carefully for cues, acting as a musician himself. Peter and the Wolf might be a children’s story, but Kingsley’s astounding and award-winning artistry emphasized the sophisticated harmonies and phrasing that Prokofiev worked in so brilliantly.