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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
November 6, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
The string-orchestra repertoire isn't especially poor, but when most of the best material lies in a roughly fifty-year chunk of the eighteenth century, it's understandable that an ensemble might turn to filching or even to outright piracy. Gidon Kremer's Kremerata Baltica offered Saturday night at Davies Symphony Hall a first in my experience: a concert entirely of arrangements. The remarkable thing was that they'd managed so neatly to pick originals that they could improve on.
Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet has been around for decades as a "Chamber Symphony," in Rudolf Barshai's pretty straightforward arrangement. The piece's not-very-believable "intimacy" doesn't wear well, and blowing it up to chamber-orchestra dimensions does it some good. Abram Stassevich's version is more elaborate than Barshai's, switching from solo to tutti more often, and including timpani (not intrusive, but underlining climactic moments). There were a few places where it was difficult to tell what was the arrangement and what was the performance. (The second movement, for example, has a violin line that goes from open G to D to A to E in a way that demands open strings, but apart from the G, the Kremerata violins used stopped strings. An interpretive decision, or something in the Stassevich score?)
More Shostakovich followed it: the very late Violin Sonata, in an arrangement by Michael Zinman and Andrei Pushkarev. It's a piece that it's difficult to imagine in any other than its ordinary guise, with one of those bleak late-Shostakovich piano parts underneath and a hurt, bewildered violin part very much on top. Not, to say the least, the most propitious candidate for transcription. But it worked; it really did. Resolving the piano part into strings made for some amazing effects. (There was one brief, illuminated chorale-like passage that I'd never noticed before; it had been there all along, but it was only when I heard strings play it that it made me think of the other "chorales" in late Shostakovich, like the luminous one towards the end of the Fourteenth Quartet.) This arrangement had percussion, too, and percussion tailored very nicely to the late-Shostakovich sound-scape, with a lot of woodblock and tam-tam. It was here that you first got to hear a little of Gidon Kremer. I confess that I'd forgotten what a range he has. He does the whispery-voice-from-beyond business just as well as he ever did; but he has striking power when he wants to use it. And here he did. The "Chamber Symphony" set up obvious and familiar challenges for the players, which were met easily. The Violin Sonata set up un-obvious and unfamiliar challenges, met just as handily. It was here that we got to see just how strong the orchestra was; and they were quite terrifyingly good. Ensemble like that, without a conductor, is very tough work.
So my hopes were high for the Schubert G-major Quartet on the second half; and they were justified. If any Schubert quartet sits uneasily in its genre, it's this one, with its quiet tremolos and its massive, quasi-orchestral sonorities. Victor Kissine's arrangement was ingenious (why was there nothing about any of the arrangers in the program?). Kissine splits up sections and puts them back together again, spotlighting individual soloists and then wrapping them back into the ensemble, breaking up the the body of the scherzo (for example) in a way I swear he borrowed from Handel's Op. 6 concerti grossi, where the music was solo or tutti in such swift succession that you weren't sure which it would be next second. In the opening movement and the second, slow movement, the contrast was mostly of soulful solos and energetic tuttis; in the finale it was ingeniously-contrived orchestration, with the concertmaster (Kremer) taking the most outrageous first violin lines as soloist, but with some discreet octave-below doubling in places. If the Kremerata players have a fault, it's that they tend to the fast, light bow when they ought to be digging in. They were brilliantly, almost preternaturally, together; but at their most ferocious there was still too much air in the sound, too little attack. It was fascinating to hear their precision-controlled version of the chord-flung-up-an-octave gesture that's all over the first movement, but any good quartet would have wrung more thrill out of it. That said, the lyrical passages assigned to soloists were marvelous, blissful and serene, and played impeccably by the Kremerata principals. The encore was Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade," in a frisky arrangement by Pushkarev (who is, incidentally, the Kremerata's percussionist) where Kremer took the lead (in Stephane Grappelli mode) and the underlying tune emerged only at the last possible moment.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
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