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SYMPHONY REVIEW
January 18, 2004
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By Scott MacClelland
While the Monterey Symphony has an impressive lock on its constituency — with regularly sold-out audiences in its Carmel performances at Sunset Center — it now also shows the tarnish of deferred maintenance. A five-year stint as music director by Kate Tamarkin, ending with the current subscription season, has left a parched legacy of low morale and deteriorated discipline among the orchestra's musicians, many of whom appear on a hit-and-miss rotation.
The orchestra revealed its current state at last Sunday's performance of Mozart under the direction of guest Imant Kotsinsh, a Latvia-born veteran conductor of Moscow's Bolshoi opera orchestra and, now, an on-call violinist/conductor in the Bay Area. In the Don Giovanni Overture and “Jupiter” Symphony, entrances were often ragged and ensemble, mostly noticeable in the violins, was, in professional terms, too often borderline.
Symphony management has, like the other classical presenters, rejected the still-new LARES sound enhancement system as currently set. (Sunset Center management has announced no plans to actively tune the system according to its potential, much touted following a two-year renovation completed last summer.) Physical, non-electronic adjustments are all that remain, and the Symphony has experimented with moving the shell, repositioning the orchestra and lowering sound absorbing curtains along the walls. As deployed Sunday, those curtains turned a dry hall into a dead hall. Even at its best, the concert sounded as if filtered through an acoustic scrim, extending no real presence into the auditorium. Under these conditions, any conductor would wage a losing battle in trying to achieve real orchestral sonority, to say nothing of the “designer” timbres preferred by some.
Kotsinsh's approach to the Mozart was direct and deliberate. The opening tempo of the overture was unusually broad, underscoring its sense of foreboding, but, thanks to the deadly acoustics, the allegro never caught fire. Much the same suppressed the “Jupiter,” even robbing the contrapuntal finale of its unique, often breathtaking impact. Following the interval, the talented young (now 19) Howard Zhang joined Kotsinsh in Brahms' Violin Concerto in D. As against his last appearance with the Symphony (two years ago) when he treated conductor Tamarkin to a snippy, even surly, Tchaikovsky concerto, Zhang redeemed himself with the Brahms. Throwing caution to the winds, he attacked his entrances with unusual force of personality. The occasional missed note left no imprint as he drove through the daunting score with the high-spirited abandon of a thoroughbred. For the first-movement cadenza, Zhang chose the rarely heard (and idiosyncratic) Leopold Auer concoction. Otherwise, Kotsinsh demonstrated skilled leadership and the orchestra came through with its best playing of the day. Because of that, the room's miserly distortion of their sound was at its most evident. Oboist Bennie Cottone was given a bow for his solo work, but in the situation his tone sounded strident and edgy. One can only wonder what the place sounds like to the musicians. Last fall, without fanfare, a music-director search committee set its sights on New York Philharmonic associate conductor Roberto Minczuk. (The Brazil-born Minczuk conducted the Monterey Symphony in January 2000.) Now enjoying an international conducting career, the former horn player attended Sunday's concert in Carmel with his manager from Columbia Artists and, during intermission, expressed to this reporter his concerns about the acoustics of the hall: “The orchestra sounds like it's not in the same room.” Whether Minczuk signs with the Monterey Symphony is still at the “hopefully” stage, he said.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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Imant Kotsinsh