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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
April 5, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
I went to Hertz Hall last Saturday night with the expectation of hearing a great violist. I came out two
hours later with my expectation fulfilled, yes. But the Moscow Soloists deserve full billing alongside
Yuri Bashmet; they're as fine a string orchestra as I've ever heard.
Is there another string orchestra with a sound so distinctive and so unified as this? The Moscow
Soloists use a fast bow, a lot of pinpoint, digging-into-the-string articulation, and not much vibrato.
It's not the airy, effortless sound of one of the great English string orchestras; this is a sound with a
lot of grit in it. But hardly any apparent effort. Seldom has so much sound emanated from so few with so
little dramatic gesturing from anyone. Not even Bashmet, who among string-players-turned-maestri is one of
the best I've seen — a clear beat, functional, informative — not dessicated, but everything to
the point.
That sound made for an exhilarating Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence. A string sextet is hard to
divide up among the players of a small orchestra like this (especially the lower parts — here there
were four violas, three cellos and a bass to be split four ways, and any string player who's played
two-on-a-part will understand the difficulty of the task the orchestra had set itself). But such was the
unanimity of the violins that the lower strings only rarely sounded outnumbered. The violins were bright,
clear, and ruthlessly together in a way that paradoxically made the section sound smaller — there was
none of the "fuzz" (either rhythmically or pitch-wise) that suggests large numbers. And they balanced
themselves tactfully to the lower strings.
If that suggests a clinically clean kind of playing, the Tchaikovsky proved otherwise. The two long duets
between concertmaster Elena Revich and principal cellist Alexei Naidenov in the Tchaikovsky's slow
movement were proof enough. Revich especially has a sound to ravish the ear, rich and keen at once. The
scherzo with its bristling repeated notes was full of disciplined fury, and the finale was just
jaw-dropping — a sextet has trouble enough keeping its bearings in that fugato, but this band tore
through it with razor-sharp ensemble in all parts.
 The Tchaikovsky was the second half; the first half was the non-Russian one. The concert opened with Bach's Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, with Bashmet and the group's principal viola Vitaly Astakhov as soloists. It was one of those performances that make clear that the players are trying to be "baroque," but haven't quite gotten the point. You might expect that a bunch of Russians, with cellos in place of gambas (and the veteran pianist Mikhail Muntian, incredibly, playing continuo harpsichord), would make for a rich, lush, heavy-handed "BB6." Not a bit of it, I'm half-sorry to say. It was a light, almost mincingly articulated performance, and top-heavy if anything; the "gamba" cellos joined in lustily when they had a thematic entry in the first movement, but otherwise their main task seemed to be staying out of the violas' way. The viola playing itself was remarkably strong and nimble, and the dusky-toned Astakhov (playing second) could more than hold his own beside his famous partner. Bashmet played with marvelous ease, but was just a bit too fond of showing off his skill playing high up the D string in the slow movement. And one quirk of phrasing of his in the same movement was consistent and irritating enough to deserve mention here. The theme of the movement begins with four notes, the third a long one with a trill that resolves to the fourth. Then there's a break, and then the rest of the theme. Bashmet never treated the fourth note as the resolution of the third. He let the trill trail off, then hit the fourth note as though it were the start of a new phrase. Every time. It sounds a small thing, but it was a failure of syntax — on the order of replying to the question "How are you?" with "I AM fine." It was all the stranger because Astakhov didn't do the same. Immediately after came Britten's Lachrymae. I was impressed again with the orchestra's discipline: doing this piece without a conductor is no joke. And the amazing thing is that they really did do it "without a conductor" — no one was ostentatiously bobbing up and down. Bashmet handled many things very discreetly from his station in the middle of the orchestra, and Revich did nearly all the rest, but so subtly that you would never suspect the performance of being "run" from anywhere at all. And yet the orchestra was alert throughout, urgent where it needed to be, coldly static and transparent where it needed to be. The band followed Bashmet mood by mercurial mood, and there were places where the mere choice of tone-color was enough to make you catch your breath — the immensely still, remote, suspended string chords in the "pizzicato variation" for one.
Bashmet was a wonder, forsaking color at the start only to fling it at you later, defiantly virtuosic and on top of the orchestra one moment and in the thick of the ensemble the next, his keening line standing out in the densest textures. And the ending, the dissolving of Britten back into Dowland, was played as finely as I have ever heard it done, the orchestra taking on — not quite the colors of a viol consort, but the manner of one, sad and dark and knowing full well where it and we are going. And Bashmet was not on top of that sorrowful texture but in it. The three Takemitsu film-score excerpts that followed were perfect material for this orchestra. The sharply articulated rhythms of "Music of Training and Rest" from José Torres, which kept suggesting a tango without ever going near a tango meter (an impressive feat); the Ligetian clouds of sound that waft over the "Funeral Music" from Black Rain; the sleazy waltz from The Face of Another — all this the Moscow Soloists made vivid with evident pleasure. The encores were as unusual as the program. First came the opening aria of Stravinsky's opera Mavra, with viola as protagonist (Bashmet in slightly-arch mode, no vibrato, feigning naïveté). Next, Bashmet without viola, conducting the goofy polka from Shostakovich's Age of Gold, in which the orchestra got its first chance in the evening to be silly. Then Bashmet with viola again, doing the delicate slow movement of Vivaldi's viola-d'amore-and-lute concerto. Well, it was all splendid. And true.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about
music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
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Yuri Bashmet