|
SYMPHONY REVIEW
Berkeley Symphony Margot Schwartz George Thomson January 13, 2007
|
Spiritual Journey By Lisa Hirsch
Berkeley Symphony’s first concert of the year, conducted by George Thomson on January 13, was a typically eclectic and interesting affair. It featured two big works — one was an important Bay Area premiere, and the other a standard — as well as a pair of short, thoughtfully programmed charmers.
The concert went by the name "Hold On," after Olly Wilson’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Hold On." The composer, now a professor of music emeritus at UC Berkeley, named the symphony for the African American spiritual whose melody is at the heart of the work. "Hold On" got an entirely successful performance, the kind that leaves the listener wanting to hear the work again, unlike the Sibelius Violin Concerto, the other major work of the night.
"Hold On" can’t be pigeonholed stylistically. It’s sometimes jarringly dissonant and sometimes beautifully consonant. The dissonances aren’t the dissonance of doctrine — they’re there to disturb the listener rather than to conform to a compositional system. Wilson’s comments on the symphony state that the work both reflects on and celebrates the African American spiritual tradition. He mentions that the opening movement focuses on human persistence, tenacity, and fortitude. (Those are also the central themes of the spiritual Hold On.) That first movement is fantastically energetic, often dense and jagged, with complex cross-rhythms across the orchestra. It also contains a strikingly beautiful contrasting section in which Wilson sets a plangent oboe solo in a web of shimmering string sound.
He’s a master of orchestration, and that section is only one of many beauties in "Hold On." Another comes at the opening of the second movement: a wash of winds punctuated by muted brass solos, and at the movement’s close, where slightly out-of-phase strings repeated a phrase while circling a particular tone. That movement is explicitly based on Hold On. The last movement opens where the second movement ends, although at a much faster tempo. Prominent brass fanfares and a long celebratory section follow. The spiritual’s melody reappears toward the end of the movement, and the symphony slowly and quietly dies away into nothingness. "Hold On" is a terrific work on a large and ambitious scale, and Thomson did a great job with it. We can hope that other Bay Area orchestras pick it up.
The Sibelius is a showpiece for the violinist, and needs a virtuosic, assured reading to make its full effect. Not that the score doesn’t have many beauties apart from the flashy solo part and its many effects — from the cool and granitelike opening, to the thumping, almost primitive rhythms of the last movement. But the violinist must be fierce and gentle by turns, and must always play with great panache and courage. In Margot Schwartz, who grew up in Oakland and attended the Crowden School, the Symphony had a soloist whose strengths were best displayed in the gentler parts of the score. She was at her best in the slow movement, where the warm beauty of her low register and her strong sense of line sustained the mood of the music well. The fast outer movements were less satisfactory, largely because Schwartz seemed to be playing carefully rather than letting loose and taking some risks. This manifested itself in a certain level of rhythmic rigidity in runs and arpeggios and, perhaps, in an unwillingness to let go emotionally and take some musical risks. Maybe the caution was justifiable; Schwartz suffered occasional lapses of intonation and smudged notes here and there. The last movement was taken under the ideal tempo, and yet something went a bit wrong in the last movement’s ghostly passage in harmonics. Schwartz is a young player at the beginning of her career. While she received wonderfully sympathetic and attentive support from Thomson and the orchestra, perhaps nerves got the better of her. Certainly this won’t be the last we’ll hear of her, and likely with more experience will come more assured performances. The concert opened with Stravinsky’s Concertino for Twelve Instruments. It’s a work that originated as a string quartet and was rescored by the composer for the odd little ensemble of flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, tenor trombone, bass trombone, violin, and cello, with the two strings both described as obligato. It’s a good, not great, work, with some great moments, notably the long double-stopped violin solo, wry and plaintive by turns, and the jazzy middle section. In an inspired bit of programming, the second half of the program led off with an overture-in-all-but-name, Matthew Locke’s 1674 Curtain Tune, written for an adaptation of The Tempest. A subset of the orchestral strings played the Curtain Tune in fine Baroque style, without vibrato and with gorgeous phrasing. It made a great prelude to "Hold On," which also has string-only sections (especially the closing) of great sustained beauty. And the Locke segued so smoothly into the Wilson — because Thomson never relaxed between the two — that a number of audience members were fooled into thinking they were movements of the same work (the clue was the theorbo player’s quiet exit at the close of the Locke).
(Lisa Hirsch, a technical writer, studied music at Brandeis and SUNY/Stony Brook.)
|
George Thomson
