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By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune October 05. 2014 7:59PM Rogue Valley Symphony season debut combines virtuosity, emotion The Rogue Valley Symphony's 2014-2015 season got off to a rousing start  Friday  night in Ashland with a little help from a young, Bulgarian-born violinist. Bella Hristova's performance of Prokofiev's fiendishly difficult Violin Concerto No. 1 combined jaw-dropping virtuosity with a deeply felt emotional warmth.   Conductor Martin Majkut welcomed the Bulgarian-born violinist to Southern Oregon University's Music Recital Hall for the season's first program, in which her performance was sandwiched between "Oaken Sky," a short (seven minutes), newish (2011) piece by the young American composer Chris Rogerson, and Beethoven's landmark Symphony No. 3, "Eroica."   Hristova proved more than up to the challenge of Prokofiev's 1917 masterpiece. Her dark hair pulled back, her body swaying athletically with the piece's many moods, she mixed exquisite phrasing with brilliant tonality. This is one of the finest concertos of the 20th century, and Hristova seemed at home in its soul-stirring torment and sheer Russian soul.   Hristova began violin studies at age 6, took master classes with Ruggiero Ricci at the Mozarteum in Salzburg at 12, studied with Ida Kavafian at the Curtis Institute of Music and won the Avery Fisher Career Grant for outstanding instrumentalists in 2013.   In a measure of the effect her performance had, the audience wouldn't let her go without an encore, even though it knew it was facing Beethoven's famously long (almost an hour) Symphony No. 3 next on the program. Hristova responded by playing a fiery number she introduced as simply a Bulgarian folk dance.    Rogerson's "Oaken Sky" could have been inspired by the Rogue Valley, much of which was an oak savanna before settlement by pioneers began altering the landscape. It wasn't. Rogerson lives in New Jersey, where he is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University.     But his tone poem would be the perfect track for gazing at a starry sky on a clear autumn night. Its theme was evoked by the strings and further developed by the woodwinds. As the piece built energy, it alternated between moments of stark clarity underscored by the percussion and murkier passages that suggested perhaps the night sky seen through a canopy of branches.   The presence of the piece on the program testified to Majkut's penchant for mixing old and new, with the evening's three compositions spread more or less evenly over a period of two centuries.   "Eroica" (actually "Sinfonia Eroica," or "Heroic Symphony") was the second name Beethoven gave his third symphony. When he completed it in 1804, he named it "Buonaparte" in honor of Napoleon, whom he then thought championed the common person against the tyranny of monarchs. But when Napoleon declared himself emperor, Beethoven is said to have torn up the music in disgust and later re-named the piece (although an infusion of cash from a patron probably also played a role).   Under Majkut's baton, the orchestra gave an emotional performance of the long first movement, which introduced two different themes and, after a lot of dissonance, broke a classic rule by introducing a new theme in the development section.   The solemn second movement plunged into the despair of the famed funeral march in C minor (which the Boston Symphony Orchestra changed its program to play on Nov. 22, 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy).   The conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein once said that those two movements are "perhaps the greatest two movements in all symphonic music." They were riveting  Friday , despite the symphony's length.   The short, third movement scherzo, with its hunting calls from the horns, and some of the most familiar passages of the symphony, came across with an indomitable air. The exuberant fourth movement, with its wide emotional range, revisited a theme Beethoven had used in earlier compositions, then came to its towering climax.     With the symphony, Beethoven changed music forever. It was as if he ripped open his chest and laid bare his heart, along with his hopes, fears and a romantic concept of heroism. The work's unprecedented emotional power is often credited with starting the Romantic period in music.   The symphony's length — it is twice as long as the symphonies of Haydn or Mozart, with a first movement alone that's as long as an entire classical symphony — still makes it a challenge for audiences. It also introduces and develops so many musical ideas that it can feel a bit overwhelming. Yet it is full of deeply affecting music, as Majkut and the orchestra demonstrated.   Reach Medford freelance writer Bill Varble at  [email protected] . http://www.mailtribune.com/article/20141005/NEWS/141009803 © 2015 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->