Asbury Park Press previews Lacombe’s final NJSO concerts

Music Director Jacques Lacombe conducts his final concerts with the NJSO in the classical season finale, June 9–12 in Englewood, Red Bank and Newark. Lacombe ends his triumphant six-year tenure with a program of some of his favorite works by Ravel and Rachmaninoff, as well as a piece by one of the composers of the inaugural NJSO Edward T. Cone Composition Institute.

The Asbury Park Press writes:

Jacques Lacombe conducts his final concerts with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in June at three theaters around the state, leading the state orchestra through repertoire designed to show off the ensemble and acknowledge their work together over the last six years.

The program will feature Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with guest pianist Joyce Yang and two works by Maurice Ravel, the “Daphnis and Chloé” Suite No. 2 and “La Valse.” The ensemble also will revisit Chris Rogerson’s “Night in the City,” a work it premiered in 2014.

“These are my farewell concerts as music director, and I wanted to really showcase the orchestra,“ Lacombe said in a news release. “This program feels like coming full circle and looking back on what we’ve done together on this journey, celebrating the quality of the orchestra and everything that’s happening in New Jersey.”

Chinese American conductor Xian Zhang takes over as NJSO Music Director for the 2016-17 season. Among his other engagements, the French Canadian Lacombe will take over as director of Germany’s Bonn Opera.

The concert continues a theme of French music the director has pursued throughout the season and, with the Rogerson, also looks back at his work developing new music with the ensemble and helping establish the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute in cooperation with Princeton University. “Night in the City” was workshopped and premiered by the NJSO in 2014, the first year of the institute.

Rogerson is a composer-in-residence with the Amarillo Symphony and a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. He has had work performed with orchestras in the U.S. including the Atlanta Symphony and by leading new music ensembles.

“He is already such a well-accomplished composer, and he knows how to make the orchestra sound good,” Lacombe said. “There’s a very youthful energy in his music, and yet it has a focus, purpose and a message that clearly carries through the piece.”

Yang is making her debut with the NJSO and is also performing with the New York Philharmonic.

She has performed with the major orchestras in the U.S., including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

She will be playing the thrilling Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, a turbulent late Romantic work, highly virtuosic and challenging for even the best pianists. For the listener, it is an overwhelming saturation of fluid emotions and soul fireworks.

The two Ravel works on the program illustrate the French master’s command of the orchestra and similarly sweep the listener up in a dramatic, emotional kaleidoscope. Few composers in history knew better than Ravel how to get the most out of an orchestra, particularly in the way of instrumental color and precise emotional expression, but also through a judicious use of astounding harmonies and shifts.

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Rogerson will be speaking with the audience in an Artist Chat offered before the concert starting one hour before the Saturday concert in the Count Basie’s Carlton Room (adjacent to the box office). At NJPAC, a prelude performance will be featured in the lobby before the concert, featuring young musicians from the NJSO Academy.

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