San Francisco Classical Voice

February 5, 1999

In its concert at Herbst Theater last Friday, the Classical Philharmonic gave its best effort in the last piece on the program, Gordon Getty's "Joan and the Bells." Most of the audience had come to hear this work, and at its conclusion, the crowd in the dress circle--where I was sitting--made a collective lean forward to catch a glimpse of the lanky composer and philanthropist, who stepped up to acknowledge the warm reception given his work and its first American performance.

"Joan and the Bells" is Getty's treatment of the Joan of Arc story, set for orchestra and chorus, with baritone and soprano soloists for the parts of Joan and her prosecutor Pierre Cauchon. The reflective central movement, a long soliloquy for Joan, is flanked by clangorous outer movements, the first of which involves a male chorus. The final movement, using a mixed chorus, ends with a racket a bit outsized for the work's modest temporal dimensions--about fifteen minutes.

Soprano Lisa Delan gave a fine performance as Joan, coloring her delivery of significant words, like "perjured," without distorting the larger musical line. Much of her part contains rhapsodic declamation with little serious threat of obfuscation from the accompanying orchestra. Macatee Hollies' baritone, on the other hand, was sometimes buried beneath the Straussian accompaniment in the opening movement, despite his best efforts to cut through it with clearly shaped lines and crisp diction. The chorus, well prepared by Magen Solomon, sang well too, responding sensitively to Lawrence Kohl's conducting.

Earlier in the evening another American premiere, Jean-Michel Damase's three-movement Symphonie, a bland work, was given an earnest reading and a ho-hum reception. Although its French composer purportedly admires Ravel and Faure in particular, the piecemeal organization of Damase's Symphonie into galumphing and loud dissonant segments juxtaposed with spells of self-conscious lyricism brought Copland and Prokofiev to mind--and the expression "classical music with wrong notes." The work doesn't lack pretty moments, the second movement's passages for flute and violins being among these, but the schmaltzy episodes in which the violin section doubles a broad melodic line of the brass quickly curdled, evoking for this listener the musically predictable cliches of movie scores.

The concert opened with a nicely controlled performance of Debussy's Prelude a l'Apres-midi d'un Faune. After intermission, Kohl's ensemble reached further back into nineteenth-century France (the concert was sponsored in part by Mayor Brown's grandly named "San Francisco--Paris Sister City Committee") to perform the Overture to "Les Francs Juges," a work Berlioz wrote in his teens, the manuscript of which, according to Kohl, the composer would probably have destroyed along with the rest of this opera, had he been able to find it.

It takes a top-flight ensemble to rehabilitate second-tier works like this, and the Classical Philharmonic's tentative rendering of its introduction, in which the players seemed to trust neither themselves nor their director, gave me the impression that most of them had just come from their day jobs but might have overcome some of the glaring problems of synchronization and intonation with a little more rehearsal time and a day's rest.

The audio clips linked below are taken from a recording of the first performance of "Joan and the Bells" given on September 9, 1998 in Ulyanovsk, by the Russian National Orchestra conducted by Mikhail Pletnev, with baritone Gleb Antonov and soprano Lisa Delan.

To hear the clip you need to have the RealAudio player on your computer. You can download this without charge by clicking on the following text: RealAudio