San Francisco Classical Voice

The finale is one of Beethoven's most high-spirited, and a sense of fun was there in the cocky way Kodama played the snappy sixteenth-note figure that generates the movement. The passage in relative minor key showed she was having a rollicking good time tearing into it with plenty of abandon. She also adjusted the tempo slightly in the other passages in minor to enhance the return to the home key. The exquisitely soft passage near the end was floated out, creating a feeling of total serenity before the orchestra erupted in jubilation.

Contrasted with the brilliance of Beethoven came the faint sounds of Klangfarbenmelodie (literally, "tone-color melody" — a technique pioneered by Webern nearly a century ago). Jörg Widmann says of the opening section of his Chor for Orchestra that it is "speaking across wide stretches with one voice." By tuning, or detuning, the solo instruments of the orchestra at the beginning, Widmann spins out a continuously-unfolding melody, passing from instrument to instrument like changing stops on an organ — one which has not been played in a long time and has to be carefully tested before it can be played "mit vollem Werke."

Widmann seems to ask what other ways of hearing and responding to pitch might be possible, invoking earlier tuning systems that some say had expressive possibilities beyond what became the norm in the twentieth century. Even adjusting to the changes in pitch, which were done expressively, I can't say I could follow the flood of suspensions crowding the air when Chor reached high tide. When it suddenly morphed into a Baroque chorale, we dropped back into Bach; the effect was chilling, as it always is when we are suddenly confronted abruptly with the past. Chor is an apt title. It could have been a wordless chorale singing and screaming down through the ages or an indigenous form of American music where, as the jazzman says, "a cat just blows." Nagano knows his way through this music better than anyone on either side of the Atlantic; he conducted it with power and conviction.

The preceding first half of the program was scarcely less rich. A unique aspect of Berkeley Symphony's recent concerts is the inclusion of music which isn't orchestral at all. David Wessel's Singularities, for touch-sensitive controller and 1,000 software oscillators, is a journey both outward and inward. Seated front stage center at a simple keyboard, or rather key-pad, Wessel created layers of sound that seemed to approach and recede in space, taking on a most non-tactile reality. He evoked vocal sounds suspended in air with no need of breath to sustain them. Galaxies and molecules became one. Was there any beginning or end to the piece, or to ourselves? Wessel calmly and simply reached out to touch our lives and connect us with the great universe.

One more "singularity" graced the program. Stuart Canin is the rare soloist who is also a chamber musician par excellence. He demonstrated this in twice: as soloist in Bartók's Rhapsody No. 1 for violin and orchestra, and as leader in the Weingartner's expanded “superstring” version of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. Bartók's Rhapsody is based on folk melodies of Romania and Hungary. The violin is required to come very close to what the human voice can do: sing in the cracks. Canin did that with great subtlety while coaxing all manner of rustic colors from the fiddle.

In the Beethoven Fugue, he led New Century-style (i.e., standing, and while playing a part of legendary difficulty). It is difficult enough to get through this arrangement with a conductor; but somehow Canin made it sound more natural without one. Though it was originally written as the finale of one of his last quartets, Beethoven was persuaded at length to publish the Grosse Fuge as a stand-alone work, and even made an arrangement for piano duet. The quartet version probably captures its ferocious energy best, but as led by Canin the added power of projection of a string orchestra yielded a work on a cosmic scale made intimate — an evanescent yet unshakeable monument in sound.