Press:

Edmonton Journal

Concert review: ESO up to the challenge in excellent Eddins Effect concert

Posted: February, 2015

Saturday night’s concert by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra was something of a special occasion for its music director Bill Eddins.

It was mostly devoted to the music he enjoys so much, that very American blend of the classical and jazz, in the tradition of Gershwin and Bernstein.  The concert was titled The Eddins Effect, and its timing was spot on, as it was announced on Friday that his contract with the ESO has been extended through the 2016/2017 season.

The three jazz-related symphonic works he programmed were all by composers who will almost certainly have been unfamiliar to the audience.  All three have the reputation as eccentrics, mavericks of the classical music world.

Friedrich Guida’s Concerto for Cello and String Orchestra (which includes percussion and guitars) was written in 1980 for cellist Heinrich Schiff.  It is a kind of mad-cap patchwork of pastiche, from rock and jazz through echoes of early music in the style of the Spaniard Rodrigo, to Souza-like marches mixed with the cancan.

It’s crazy, but undeniably fun, with some whimsical lyrical beauty in a second slow movement that recalls the idiom of Stephen Foster.  It doesn’t exactly challenge audiences, but it does challenge the soloist, especially in the extended, sometimes improvised, cadenza.

The young Canadian cellist Denise Djokic made a very strong case for the piece, her virtuosos playing binding together the weird elements.  I thought she was more idiomatically effective than Schiff’s own recording, especially in the first movement, where she rocked with the best.

The StarPheonix

A Night of Shining Strings

By Hannah Spray

Posted: 2/10/14

Any time cellist Denise Djokic wants to come back to Saskatoon, she is more than welcome.

“Amazing” and “unbelievable” were among the words I overheard whispered during her performance Saturday with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra at TCU Place.
Of course, some of the credit must go to Tchaikovsky for his brilliant Variations on a Rococo Theme, a virtuosic piece that calls on the solo cellist to do things we ordinary symphony-goers didn’t realize were possible.

After the cadenzas in the fifth variation, when Djokic’s fingers danced over the trills and runs, I wanted to stand up and applaud right there and then.

Then there were the notes in the high register, each one more amazing than the last, plus the chords and the soulful melodies.

The entire performance was one of beauty.

Winnipeg Free Press

Russian master expertly handled

Posted: 10/26/2013

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra kicked off its first-ever Tchaikovsky Festival Friday night, with the latest concert in its Masterworks series featuring three classics by the 19th-century Russian wonder.

The program featured acclaimed Canadian cellist Denise Djokic performing Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33 that unfolds as a wonderfully crafted set of theme and seven variations. But in Djokic’s hands, it became so much more, as she displayed a breathtaking artistry that held the audience of 1,448 spellbound.      The Halifax-born musician immediately launched into the theme that provided the first taste of her well-burnished tone. Her lyrical phrasing and colourful palette of sound — including razor-thin notes coaxed out of her instrument’s extreme upper range — was matched only by her virtuosic technique, immediately evident with her unflinching delivery of triplet passages during the first variation. In spite of a few perilous moments, her soulful cadenzas held the crowd rapt until her final, dazzling final variation with its quicksilver 32nd-note runs. Quite deservedly, this dynamo earned two curtain calls with a standing ovation for her enthralling performance.

Symphony Under the Sky: Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák

Organization: Edmonton Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: Bob Bernhardt

When: Friday, August 30, 2013

EDMONTON – The Edmonton Symphony took a real risk on Friday with the opening concert in Symphony Under the Sky, the orchestra’s mini festival.

The highlight of the concert, though, was Dvorák’s heartfelt and heart-winning cello concerto. The young Canadian cellist Denise Djokic sensibly warmed up — the wind was both strong and a little chill — with what she had originally intended as an encore, Tchaikovsky’s little Nocturne for cello and orchestra.

This was, though, a whimsical little prelude to the main fare. Djokic’s approach to the Dvorák was both highly romantic, and, in its way, commendably youthful.

For this was very much a Romantic concerto performance in the grand style, the soloist in a passionate dialogue with the orchestra, sometimes leading, sometimes arguing.

The effect was perhaps highlighted by the over-amplification of the cello (understandable in the open air). But it was also a solo performance of heightened, if never exaggerated, emotions.  So often the concerto is played autumnally, old age looking back. But from her opening lines, the impassioned cello breaking into the mellow fruitfulness of the orchestra, Djokic emphasized the vigour that is also in the work.   The lyricism, especially in the slow movement, was the yearning of loves desired, loves being lost, rather than of old age reminiscing. Indeed, the opening of the finale was jaunty, almost insolent.

Dvorák reworked his original ideas for this movement, following the death of his sister-in-law, whom he himself had proposed to many years earlier. The lyricism, when it does return toward the end, can understandably sound valedictory. But Djokic imbued it with a sense of hope, of looking forward rather than looking back, as the clouds turned pink and then gold in the gathering evening.