David J Brown, LA Opus, 4th March 2020
“The combination of never having heard anything by Christopher Rouse performed live, nor yet a Paganini violin concerto or Rachmaninoff’s final symphony in a concert hall for nearly 30 years, was enough to make the PSO’s late February program stand out. Add to that the prospect of enjoying once again Michael Francis’s conducting of the orchestra (their magisterial account of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 still a stand-out memory), plus the violin virtuosity of Augustin Hadelich—last here in the very different territory of Bernstein’s Serenade—and the concert became unmissable. And it didn’t disappoint…
Here, as the music surged from one vivid texture to the next, the image of “Mad Vince” in the Roger Corman movie came readily to mind, though the score of Prospero’s Rooms makes no explicit correlations with the blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and finally black and blood-red chambers through which the maddened Prince Prospero rushes to his doom. Through it all Mr. Francis and the PSO on top form clearly reveled in Rouse’s seething riot of orchestral color, rendered the yet more vivid, of course, by the Segerstrom Hall’s marvelous acoustic…”
