San Francisco Classical Voice

The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performance at Zellerbach Hall on Thursday proved to be a frustrating event. So much was excellent, yet I was often distracted by myriad small deficiencies.

At first glance, the program had good balance: It opened with Schoenberg's string orchestra arrangement of his string sextet Verklärte Nacht. This was followed by Kaija Saariaho's NoaNoa for solo flute and live electronics and, after intermission, the Beethoven Triple Concerto. But in spite of the balance, a program without a masterpiece was not fulfilling. The Schoenberg, although one of the composer's few pieces with popular appeal, is still an arrangement of a work in which the composer had not yet found his voice. While Saariaho is one of the most performed European composers, she has produced much more significant pieces than NoaNoa. And the Beethoven Triple Concerto is one of that composer's least effective works.

Each work exhibited a greatness that was tinged with problems. Nagano's interpretation of Verklärte Nacht was wonderfully clean. He managed to evoke an emotionally charged performance without overromanticizing the work: Tempo fluctuations were kept to a minimum, and vibrato was expressive but not overly wide. Among the many first-chair solos in the arrangement, the viola solos, played by Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca, were exceptional for their lyricism and beauty of tone.

The missteps here were twofold. The orchestra sometimes was brought to its peak dynamic level before the climaxes were achieved, neutralizing their impact. In addition, there were several ensemble problems with the intricate counterpoint, most obvious at cadences and phrase elisions.

The inclusion of a chamber work in an otherwise orchestral program is always pleasing. It is given heightened importance and heard by a new audience which then can approach the following orchestral piece with a more or less clean slate. The Saariaho work enjoyed this advantage.

Flutist Frederick Lau gave a fine, expressive performance of NoaNoa. He was as comfortable with the more ordinary technical demands (such as quarter tones and timbrel trills) as he was with the less usual techniques, such as speaking into the instrument, working with microphones, and triggering computer events with his foot. But despite Lau's expertise, he could not give profile to an essentially shapeless composition. Although each section was well written, only the immediate gestural juxtapositions had meaning. The large-scale motion showed little form or direction.

When Beethoven wrote his Triple Concerto for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra in 1804, his intention was not to create a work on the intellectual or emotional scale of the Eroica Symphony (1803) or the Rasumovsky String Quartets (1806). Rather, the work was meant to appeal to a broader audience. (Beethoven wrote many such "populist" pieces, but most are heard rarely, if ever, today.) Furthermore, the piano solo was written at a modest technical level for his student Archduke Rudolf.

The soloists on this occasion were Momo Kodama on piano, Cary Koh on violin, and Hai-Ye Ni on cello. They all acquitted themselves well, but Hai-Ye Ni was the star among the stars. True, she had the most interesting part (it was originally written for Haydn's first-chair cellist Anton Kraft). But it was her interpretation that made her performance significant. Her playing was marked by beautiful and varied tone qualities, clean expressivity, and, at times, remarkable understatement. Her spectacular performance and Beethoven's perfect writing for the instrument in the slow movement made me yearn for a performance of the Beethoven Cello Concerto, which, of course, he never wrote.

(Ronald Caltabiano is a composer living in San Francisco and teaching at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Ronald Caltabiano, all rights reserved