San Francisco Classical Voice

CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW From Berlin, Esterházy Evoked, And A Captivating Flutist

October 7, 2000

Emmanuel Pahud

By Robert P. Commanday

It should only happen more often, that a performance reawakens music in familiar styles making it live, immediate and wholly engaging. The Haydn Ensemble Berlin did that in Herbst Theater Saturday, 14 musicians from the Philharmonic and two other major Berlin orchestras, playing not as veteran symphonikers on a touring gig, but as chamber musicians committed to the considerable best they can do.

Modeled in size and instrumentation on Haydn's orchestra at Esterházy, the ensemble met the considerable challenge of producing unified section tone with only three each of first and second violins, balancing the single viola, cello and bass (the latter two playing as one). Thus, with what is tantamount to an enlarged string quartet plus winds, they played symphonies by Haydn and Mozart. Haydn's Symphony No. 22, in E flat, The Philosopher and Mozart's Symphony No. 28 in c, K.200, framed the program splendidly. Considering how many of those composers' symphonies in their day were played by forces this size or not much larger, the repertory comes in for greater wonder and reconsideration.

The group's guest soloist, the French-Swiss flutist, Emmanuel Pahud, was a glistening feature and a colleague appropriate for this ensemble. His is a sound that captivates, much as does the voice of a great singer, a liquid, cleanly focused yet glowing tone that loses none of its pervasiveness through his effortless myriad changes in dynamic and character. However, it was not his glorious tone and command, but the music and what he could make of it that were the focus of his, and our, attention.

First, Pahud was paired with the Ensemble's founding director, the Berlin Philharmonic's principal oboe, Hansjörg Schnellenberger, playing Arthur Honegger's Concerto da Camera for flute and English horn (1948). Pahud and Schellenberger worked its charms, distinctive for the light geniality of Honegger's short phrases in dialog, and the duets between the insinuating match of these instruments, the style, modern French, suave and elegant. The Andante is darker, warmly expressive, with the flute featured as a gentle lyrical soloist. Pahud was at home and persuasive in the rhapsodic, quasi-improvisatory manner that is the tradition of French flute music of the first half of the 20th century. The Vivace was a delightful "chase" piece of humor and whimsy, Schnellenberger every bit as light and nimble on the English horn as Pahud on the flute.

A Mozartean Flair

Pahud's other major offering was Michael Haydn's Flute Concerto, a work that like many by this younger brother of Josef Haydn, I never would have thought had so much vitality and general quality. Pahud had everything to do with that impression, most importantly in pliancy of phrasing that kept drawing the music onward, shaping it with a Mozartean flair. There was no sense of the conventional classical language just following its patterns, but rather good, well-made music pursuing its own necessary course. And it was stylish, as was the playing of the little conductor-less orchestra following its concertmaster, Bernhard Hartog. They use their modern instruments, but their approach is classical, with a harpsichord in support.

Distinctive as is each of Haydn's symphonies, No. 22 sets on its own course, for one thing, by having a pair of English horns instead of oboes, joined by the two French horns, and then "radically," with first movement that's a solemn adagio. I've always believed that Mozart got his idea for the Armored Men Chorale in the Magic Flute from the "Philosopher's Walk" of that first movement, and also remembered, from the Presto, an amusing melodic turn for one of his horn concertos. The Haydn Ensemble Berlin's approach to the famous opening movement was the evening's one serious flaw, plodding along as if through a swamp, in the manner called schleppend, the horns deliberately blasting the chorale theme. Mozart's Symphony No. 28 however, was altogether graceful, vigorous and fresh.

In the concert's second half, to the accompaniment of the Herbst Theater's noisy air-conditioning , turned on during the intermission and then left running, Pahud made the first of two other entries. The first consisted of three of a humorous set of send-ups of famous flute pieces for solo flute that Heinz Holliger composed for a flute congress in 1996, Sonate (in) solit(air)e. Performed with new music articulations on the flute, puffing, blowing, whistling, humming and playing, overblowing and the like, to cartoon the Allemande from Bach's Suite for Flute alone, and the Badinerie and "Polognese" (a joke) from the B minor Suite, this was a gas, so to speak.

Unexpectedly, during the Ensemble's encore, the Menuetto from Haydn's early Scherzando. No. 3, early Haydn piece, Pahud was heard offstage, playing the lead line of the Trio, "in absentia." The distant star was no less seriously musical for all the fun he and the straight-faced group had with this.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)