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FESTIVAL REVIEW
July 26-28, 2005
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By Scott MacClelland
Bruno Weil conducted a probing and detailed exploration of Haydn's “Drum Roll” Symphony Tuesday at the Carmel Bach Festival, a performance that stood in contradiction to his lightweight reading the week before of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This puzzling inconsistency leaves the listener never knowing quite what to expect from the hot and cold running festival music director.
Assuming there are more ways to play music right (to reveal its character through the personality of the performer) than wrong (merely fouling up the notes as written), Weil most predictably reveals what turns him on and what doesn't, a difference that can be stark. Haydn definitely turns him on — witness the space and time he takes to discover what little treasures lie beneath all the stones he turns over. Beethoven excites him too when it's steeped in the example of Haydn, as in last year's Symphony No. 4 in B flat. Likewise, Mozart, again when his music lies closest to the Haydn practice, meaning his symphonies. Case in point was the “Prague” Symphony, also part of Tuesday's program. Moreover, this astonishing work excited the musicians as much as did the Haydn, resulting in one of the festival's best evenings.
The “Prague,” Mozart's 38th symphony, omits the traditional minuet, but more than makes up for it by parading three bold movements of constantly surprising invention: tuneful bits from Don Giovanni and Marriage of Figaro exploding into counterpoint; a seemingly throw-away little tune in the second movement that would reincarnate four generations later as Elgar's Enigma Variations. That the orchestra got so turned on by the piece guaranteed its great success; not a few audience members found themselves hyperventilating over it. And the Haydn, which came after, kicked that energy up another notch.
The short program opened with music from Beethoven's Ritterballett, WoO1 ("WoO" stands for "Werke ohne Opuszahl," or "works without opus numbers," so this is the designated ‘first' among the catalog of early pieces gathered for publication long after his death). The miscellany of dances and marches, lasting eight minutes, is best understood as prototypal to the composer's better-known contradances.
Thursday's early-evening survey of the complete Brandenburg concertos by Bach also found a heightened spirit among the musicians, as led from the harpsichord by Andrew Arthur. The horns in the First Concerto had their share of cracked notes, as did trumpeter Wolfgang Basch in the Second; but little glitches did the music's sprit no harm and only lent it a charming rustic quality. With Basch, the concertino included violinist Emlyn Ngai, flutist Kimberly Reighley and oboist Neil Tatman. For the Fifth Concerto, which followed, Arthur's instrument, otherwise all but inaudible to the audience, was turned at right angle with its lid reinstalled and held up by the long stick. While the first movement is famous — even infamous — for its outrageous solo cadenza, which Arthur played suitably over the top, there's an even more fascinating episode earlier on: a prototype of development technique that would become the main event in the classical sonata, especially in later Haydn and Mozart and the symphonies of Beethoven. Once again, Bach shows the next generation's composers how to do it. And, oh by the way, isn't this also the prototype for the classical piano concerto? Joining Arthur in the concertino were violinist Naomi Guy and flutist Reighley. The Third Concerto, that famous vortex for a mere ten strings, danced its seductive magic all over again; the composer kept mining the mother lode after everyone else believed all the gold was already taken. In the Fourth Concerto, violinist Cynthia Roberts did a knockout reading of its virtuosic part, while Herb Myers and Annette Bauer warbled on their recorders. The violas da gamba in the Sixth Concerto are there for little more than their quaint sonority. The two violin-family violas carry the show, and George Thomson and Michelle Dulak Thomson had more fun together in this rollicking piece than any two other musicians in the entire program. The pesante finale just about had us dancing in the aisles.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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Cynthia Roberts
