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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Orli Shaham Alasdair Neale
October 10, 2006
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Searching for Interplay By Jeff Rosenfeld
A moment during Ottorino Respighi’s tone poem The Pines of Rome seems emblematic of the Marin Symphony concert last Tuesday. In the intensely beautiful Catacombs section, the strings were playing too loudly and threatening to disrupt the prayerful serenity of MSO principal Carole Klein’s offstage trumpet solo. Music Director Alaisdar Neale twice held up his left hand toward his violins, asking them to quiet down, to no avail. The balance was only slightly off, but a crucial moment of interaction had been lost.
And so it went at the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, even in the thoroughly impressive performance of the Pines that crowned the evening. Moments of inspiration and generally excellent playing often went for naught without the interplay that binds musicians on a stage and notes in a score.
The problem was evident from the first work, Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. The violins articulated Neale’s relatively moderate tempi with admirable cleanliness, and the winds handled their devilish scampering with aplomb, but the various choirs of the orchestra weren’t always perfectly in sync with one another. Noticeably absent was a relentlessly punchy bass line — call it the “motor” — that drives an effective performance of this fizzing piece. In this case, the different choirs and registers of the orchestra seemed unable to respond to each other, and the performance was peculiarly unremarkable.
Much the same happened to Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which featured Israeli-American pianist Orli Shaham. She excelled at taming the surging, almost lurching quality of Grieg’s writing in the first movement. In the opening, thematic material turns on a dime — the piano states a melody that turns from a little march into a rhapsodic statement and then to a scamper. Yet many of her phrases, which she took care to end delicately, were tossed aside in a relatively unsympathetic and wooden orchestral response. Neale and the MSO provided no soft landings for her flights of fancy. The cadenza in the first movement was a case in point: Neale didn’t pick up on the ruminative quality of the music after the piano solo and before the final windup to the conclusion. While the violins coalesced into a warmly hushed tone in the opening of the next movement, their introductory romanza had little of the necessary pointing and shaping. The shift to Shaham’s more stylistically apt phrasing was jarring, even though the pacing didn’t give her much room to stretch the music. And while the bursts of energy of the opening of the third movement were effective, later on there was not enough of a pullback into a nostalgic, dreamy mode for the contrasting middle section. The technical assurance of the MSO players began to pay bigger dividends after intermission, in Respighi’s splashy tone poems. Frequently the strings sounded more focused than they had in the first half of the concert. The closing pages of the Fountains, depicting the Villa Medici Fountain at sunset, were particularly well-controlled in tone and pacing. Yet the brief buildup to the piece’s climax at the Trevi Fountain at midday was too abrupt. As in the Grieg, which featured some eloquent horn and bassoon solos, the Respighi featured superb work by the principal winds — from the languorous clarinet solos to the yearning English horn. There was also a growing cohesion in the strings, and the brass tone acquired a burnish that had been notably missing in the Rossini overture. However, it was the final peroration of the whole orchestra at the conclusion of the Pines that brought out the best from both Neale and the orchestra. With strong, well-tuned blasts of antiphonal brass from the middle of the hall, and superbly balanced strings, percussion, and winds on stage, the MSO produced a glorious sound for Neale in the well-graded and powerful crescendo. While the score includes an organ amid this riot of sound, I didn’t hear one at this concert and I didn’t miss it a bit. (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.)©2006 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved |
Orli Shaham
