San Francisco Classical Voice

"Those who frequent the concert hall often greet film music with condescension," began the program notes for Sunday evening's recital of the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica at Davies Hall. The evening, besides offering exhilarating playing of the highest order, was a sort of exercise in proving the extent to which that assertion is true, and why.

The program was entitled "Music for the Cinema." That ought to read "from the cinema," of course. (Why must concerts have titles? To match the CD?) The whole premise is that a composer (or arranger) can re-fashion his film score music to stand free of the visual images it originally accompanied. In the case of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho: A Narrative, that entailed assembling a string of cues hewn directly from the score. Excerpts from Astor Piazzolla's score to the film Enrico IV likewise seemed lifted directly, as set pieces. For the rest, it was an uneasy combination of reworking, assemblage, or something akin to the old-fashioned "Concert Paraphrase on Themes from..."

Curiously, though I was certainly ready to greet the film music with as much condescension as would any other concert-hall-frequenter, I found the works most directly "lifted" to be the most satisfying. Herrmann's Psycho was thrillingly performed by the ensemble of 23 young string players. The audience gave a chuckle of recognition when the group lit into the famous shrieking chords from the murder scene, but the vehemence of the playing quieted everyone down in an instant. Likewise the Piazzolla excerpts, performed with voluptuous suavity by soloist Gidon Kremer and the ensemble (augmented by a pianist and a terrific drum-set player) were utterly direct and compelling.

One step removed from the screen was Toru Takemitsu's haunting Nostalgia for violin and strings, being material from an Andrei Tarkovsky film, later reworked as an elegy to the director. The work's sumptuous chordal texture does not vary much. The lines of the solo violin (again Kremer) soar above the ensemble in a manner recalling the end of the Berg Violin Concerto. The rich and beguiling string tone of the accompaniment kept the rather lengthy work from wearing out its welcome.

At the other end of the pretentiousness scale were the Soviet and post-Soviet works on the program, which seemed to answer the question "What do you write when no one has told you anything true in sixty years?" For one thing, you get the eclecticism of Alfred Schnittke, whose Moz-ART a la Haydn for two solo violins and ensemble was the one work not derived from film at all (in its performance, Kremer was joined by Eva Bindere, the orchestra's leader). The piece revels in its own meretriciousness, and the ensemble played it up to the hilt: the conductor who arrives late and conducts the end by himself, the juvenile slathering of snippets of Mozart (real or faux? who cares?) in close canon, the chaotic dashing about the stage of the musicians.

Or you get the excruciatingly delicate and precious Little Daneliada of Giya Kancheli, a series of brief glimpses presented a number of times each. These were performed with such absolute commitment, care and refinement as to leave one hoping that something of moment might occur next. It did not.

Most egregious was the Circus Fantasy, ostensibly based on music from a 1936 film by Grigori Alexandrov, composed by Isaak Dunayevsky. I wonder how much of this thoroughly tarted-up concoction is actually the work of the arranger S. Dreznin (including perhaps the episodes of faux-Stephane-Grappelli, performed by Kremer with such panache?). The very notion of it left a bitter taste--as if someone had put on Springtime for Stalin and someone else had beefed it up to play on Broadway.

Yet the Kremerata--an ensemble of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians in their twenties, hand-picked, trained, and nurtured by Kremer--play with an assurance and affection that carries all before it. What's more, they are terrific at schtick. The concert's opening was a hilarious Farewell-Symphony-in-reverse, all set to a delightful Felliniesque galop by Nino Rota. This also formed the program's third (and second too many) encore, after a rather bloated Gershwin Lullaby and an over-the-top series of variations on Happy Birthday that sped through the popular musics of Europe.

(George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Music Conservatory, San Domenico School, living in San Rafael. )

©2000 George Thomson, all rights reserved