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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
January 25, 2005
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By Jeff Rosenfeld
There are two schools of thought about Heinz Holliger, who, for all his prominence as an oboist for many decades, has yet to spawn a successful group of followers. One school says that he is the foremost oboe virtuoso of our time; the other, that he is a peerless musician who just happens to have an oboe in his hands. Actually, there is a third school, too, that Holliger above all has been a daring advocate for deserving composers, from LeBrun and Zelenka to Maderna and Berio. Perhaps it was a nod to the third school that on Tuesday, Holliger's first chamber music appearance in San Francisco in more than two decades, he was scheduled to share the spotlight — not just with the estimable Juilliard String Quartet, but with composer Elliott Carter. After, all, the performance was to include Carter's Oboe Quartet, and any major performance of his often thorny but equally rewarding music is to be treasured.
But circumstances proved otherwise, for on arrival from Alaska, violinist Ronald Copes fell ill and required hospitalization. Since Copes was to play the Carter, and the scheduled Dvorák “American” Quartet would be equally impossible, the spotlight at Herbst Theater fell squarely on Holliger to make up the difference. School of Thought Number Three was out, and Number Two proved as ascendant as ever.
As a substitution, Holliger chose two works for solo oboe, Benjamin Britten's Six Metamorphoses After Ovid and Carter's Inner Song. The latter could not make up for the scheduled quartet, which is a masterful work. Inner Song, the centerpiece of a 1992 trilogy of pieces for oboe and harp, is a pretentious and relatively static lament, leaping high and low and wiggling about some tremolos but not really building any momentum nor achieving much sadness or soulfulness. Holliger helpfully explained that the piece is based on a half-row of six notes in a nod to the composer Stefan Wolpe, who frequently wrote on such a basis. As fluently as Holliger played the work — Carter it wrote for him (and his harpist wife Ursula) along with the quartet and the oboe concerto — it just came off as an exercise. Stripped of ensemble and counterpoint, Carter's music can be uninspiring: perhaps here the missing ingredient is mischievousness, which colors recent successful solo pieces for cello and bass clarinet. Anyway, too much of Inner Song is at full cry — it becomes uncomfortable rather than moving.
The Britten is more successful music, and Holliger gave a delightful explanation of the six character sketches based on Greek mythology. More important, he made each one-to-two minute episode a complete story, investing the full range of his flexible, penetrating tone to paint vivid portraits. Holliger drew the mirrored figures of Narcissus in maximum contrast so that they maintained identity while merging softly into the concluding tranquillo. As Arethusa turned into a fountain the music erupted with a powerful crescendo of droplets (paired sixteenths). The stillness of the concluding high D in Arethusa turned all into stone, as required. And the “tattling tongues” at Bacchus' feast had just the right impetuousness—trios of rising, staccato sixteenths jolting the swinging dotted rhythms.
I could go on, but Holliger actually didn't seem at his best, technically, even in the Britten. Some of the articulation was not dead-on clean, and a few runs were uneven or blurred. More disturbingly, pitches didn't always sit right. A couple of high notes stretched upward asymptotically toward their targets, and sometimes the reed just seemed to give up its center briefly, letting the tone sag. Holliger seemed to be dusting off cobwebs on a piece that, after all, wasn't originally supposed to be played on this evening. All of these problems resurfaced here and there in the Mozart Oboe Quartet, which, in fact, was the sole survivor of the original program. In particular, the opening tempo was just a little too breathtaking. Yet, as in the Britten, none of the problems mattered. The unsettled feeling was gone in an instant, and what emerged was a tremendous demonstration of color and phrasing. The adagio was parsed in a driving, desperate sort of passion — the breaths just a little gappier than expected on the upswing, the phrases emphasized all the more longingly on the downside, building one after the other in intensity. The concluding Rondo danced infectiously, yet Holliger and his colleagues took their time to find the contrasts in mood and inflection. Phrase by phrase they took apart a familiar chestnut and revealed startling new flavors. Holliger could not have pulled off such an individual and stunning performance without the full cooperation of The Juilliard players — Joel Smirnoff, Samuel Rhodes, and Joel Krosnick — who were silvered in sound and eloquently passionate yet unfortunately almost too deferential. Watching Holliger slouch and crouch his way through the quartet, one could see what one could hear: an electric personality devoted wholly to digging deeply into the music. His sound — ripe and hollow in the middle, sweet but piercing at the top, bawdy and bold at the bottom — is peculiar and apparently not all that reliable. It is no match for the plummy resonance so securely achieved by the best students today. His musical insight, however, is inimitable. Holliger remains a school of one.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
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Heinz Holliger