Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra presents ‘Valentine’s Romance’

Audiences love virtuosity because the flair which exceptional skill permits is exciting. It’s one of the reasons concertos for solo instruments are so popular.

But the orchestra itself can be the virtuoso when great orchestration is achieved by a composer with something to say.

The next set of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concerts features both kinds of virtuosity, soloist and ensemble. The brilliance of the orchestra aroused critical enthusiasm most recently in a review of music director Manfred Honeck and the PSO in The New Yorker.

Vasily Petrenko will conduct the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Feb. 14 to 16 at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall. The program is Edward Elgar’s “Cockaigne Overture,” Jan Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with Ray Chen as soloist and Maurice Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” Suites Nos. 1 and 2.

The rapidly rising young Russian conductor returns to Heinz Hall as the next music director of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He’ll take the helm for his new orchestra’s 75th anniversary season. Petrenko has thrived in England, revitalizing the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He was in Norway when interviewed, where he’s wrapping up his tenure as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic.

As a boy Petrenko studied voice and piano but takes delight trying his hand on all the instruments of the orchestra. He recently discovered the glockenspiel is hard to play and hard to make its sounds stop.

He opens the concert with Elgar’s popular portrait of London at the beginning of the 20th century.

“Elgar was a discovery for me, because in Russia, people know the Enigma Variations and probably the cello and violin concertos,” but most of the rest of his music is “hardly played at all.”

The Cockaigne Overture was written right after the success of the Enigma Variations, which elevated him to preeminence in the English music world.

Petrenko say he thinks first of youth about this overture, “a journey of a young man through London. It is very vivid, colorful and with a quite unique sense of humor — more than other Elgar pieces.”

Sibelius as a young man aspired to be a great violinist, until he realized his true calling was to write notes rather than to play them. His only concerto is for violin, which will be played by Chen, one of the world’s leading soloists.

The conductor says Sibelius was his passion for many years. He has always felt at home in the Nordic sound world of Sibelius and notes that St. Petersburg, where he was born and studied, is but 70 miles from the Finnish border.

The concert concludes with ballet music by “one of the all-time masters of orchestration,” according to Petrenko. Ravel drew two suites from his 1912 ballet “Daphnis and Chloe.” The second suite is the more famous and consists of the end of the ballet, starting with a softly lush evocation of dawn, followed by one of the most famous flute solos in the orchestral repertoire.