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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW Humor (or the Lack of It) in Music November 17, 2002
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By Dan Leeson
Richard Strauss couldn't tell a joke. Not that he didn't have a sense of humor, but he often went on too long, invariably waxing nostalgic or romantic in the middle of a story. This trait showed itself in his music on Sunday afternoon at Los Altos' United Methodist Church. It was a very good performance of Strauss' difficult Burlesque for Piano and Orchestra, Hélène Wickett soloist, with the Master Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra, David Ramadanoff, conductor.
It's a terrific piece with all the ingredients of a great joke. After all, who opens a one-movement piano concerto with a four-measure melodic and unaccompanied timpani solo, goes on to give the timpani a dozen or more additional solo passages, and then allows the solo timpani, not the pianist, to close the work (all nicely played by timpanist Len Sperry)? Now that's funny: a timpani as a prominent and melodic solo instrument in a piano concerto!
And what glorious music Strauss wrote! After all, he was a fully formed composer at 17 and this piece was written when he was 21. It has enough waltzes in it to be a predecessor of Der Rosenkavalier for which it has lengthy passages of melodic and harmonic affinity. The soloist has to wade through a pile of complex, fast technical passages. But leave it to Strauss not to know when to get to the punch line, and to wax romantic at the wrong moment.
If Strauss was a man who could not tell a joke, Cesar Franck did not even know what a joke was. His teacher once asked him to demonstrate his ability at improvisation and he went on for 45 minutes in F-sharp major. When asked to change keys, Franck replied, "Why? I am happy where I am." That vignette was demonstrated in Wickett's playing of another work, Franck's Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra that preceded her performance of Strauss' Burlesque. I think it to be among the most humorless compositions ever written. Following the intermission, I finally heard the music of a man who knew the secrets of telling a joke. Franz Josef Haydn's Symphony in D, "The Clock," is a regular Joe Miller joke book. I broke out laughing in the Minuet's second trio at the point where the strings become obstinate and refuse to change harmony, forcing the flute solo into a startling dissonance. And when they do the same passage a second time, the strings begrudgingly shift the harmony at the identical spot so as to allow an exquisite consonance, which surprises everyone who expected a repeat of the dissonance. Now that's a great joke. There were a few intonation problems in the strings, particularly in the first violins and the celli, but with music that clever, funny, and brilliant, who cares?
The program's opening work was the set of seven Romanian folk dances by Béla Bartók, originally for solo piano but arranged by the composer for orchestra. Now here is music for which jokes are simply irrelevant. Instead one gets dashing harmonic clashes, melodies in modal scales one can hardly figure out, and folk rhythms chock full of energy. With that kind of orchestral and compositional brilliance, you don't need jokes. Clarinetist Terry Cross produced elegantly handled rubatos in the dance "Brâul," and Anne Wharton's piccolo solo in "Pe Loc" was played professionally and in tune, as was the solo of concertmaster Doug Perry in his delightful work in "Buciumena." The Master Sinfonia is lucky to have the services of David Ramadanoff, whose improvised verbal program notes increased the listening pleasure of everyone in the audience. He is an excellent conductor, a serious well-trained musician, and he creates carefully prepared, interesting, and intelligent programs. Ever since he served as conducting associate under Seiji Ozawa with the San Francisco Symphony in the mid 1970s, the Bay Area has benefited from his presence.
(Musicologist/author Dan Leeson is a former member of the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, a retired businessman, and an editor of the 220-volume complete Mozart edition published by Bärenreiter.)
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Hélène Wickett