Christmas Eve Tradition Continues At Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 24 January 2011 05:57

Written by Jack Angstreich

On December 24th, 2010, Carnegie Hall continued a more than 40-year-old tradition by presenting the New York String Orchestra (young musicians in training) on Christmas Eve.  Performing under the able direction of Jaime Laredo, this first of two holiday concerts at Carnegie Hall, although not quite up to the level of recent concerts by, say, the Juilliard Orchestra or the Mannes Orchestra, was an enjoyable, short program, lasting about an hour, with no intermission.

It opened with a charming account of Mozart's sparkling, perennially popular Overture to his operatic masterpiece, Cosi fan tutte.

The celebrated soloists, Jennifer Koh and Benjamin Hochman, took the stage to perform Felix Mendelssohn's appealing if slight Concerto for Violin, Piano, and Strings in D Minor, written when the composer was fourteen. The likable rendition here held its own against that of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra with Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk heard in New York last summer.

Mozart's magnificent "Paris" Symphony provided a compelling, if unexceptionable, close to this buoyant evening.