San Francisco Classical Voice

February 9, 1999

Juliane Banse

The "Death of the Symphony Orchestra" has been announced so many times over the last fifty years that some of us, not unnaturally, take it as a ritual utterance rather than an actual warning of danger. Nonetheless, many large orchestras are in a precarious state, and some of the players that would once have sought out places in symphony orchestras are now making careers in smaller, more mobile, and more flexible chamber orchestras. Tuesday's visit to San Francisco by the Munich Chamber Orchestra (an all-string ensemble with just nineteen players) gave a taste of the level of playing such ensembles can attain.

The Munich Chamber Orchestra is rather young and distinctly cosmopolitan; the Italian, Anglo, Chinese and Japanese names on the roster outnumber the Germanic ones. Its sound is distinctive, airy yet substantial, quite unlike the typical American string sound. The signature characteristics are fast, light bowing and fast vibrato, together with a vigor of articulation that sets it somewhat apart from the typical English chamber-orchestra sound (which it otherwise resembles).

These virtues were muted during the opening Dvorak Serenade for Strings, Op. 22, in a performance that seemed oddly limp despite an abundance of energy. It was as if the orchestra were striving for a refinement of phrasing that it could not achieve without sacrificing sonority, the only time all evening the group seemed too small for the music. And indeed, Dvorak's lush textures, full of divisi in the lower strings, are a stretch for an orchestra containing only three cellos and four violas.

After that, the orchestra came into its own. Britten's 1939 Rimbaud song-cycle, "Les Illuminations," is a masterpiece of string writing every bit as amazing as his "Frank Bridge Variations" of two years earlier. From the opening "Fanfare," with dueling violin and viola trumpet-calls a tritone apart, to the luminous texture (all in harmonics) of "Phrase," to the sinuously descending lines of the "Interlude," which eventually tangle together in a chaos of scales, to the jaunty "savage parade" that is the cycle's culmination, "Les Illuminations" is a feast of brilliant string effects. The Munich players dug in with relish. What had seemed occasional crudity or scrappiness in the Dvorak reappeared here as a sheer zest that was a delight to see and hear.

Juliane Banse, the soprano soloist in the Britten, made a less vivid impression. She got around the part well (though the pianissimo high B-flat that Britten asks of her in "Phrase" was clearly just past her capacity). But there was something pallid about the interpretation, a lack of drama and (surprisingly in a noted Lieder singer) of evident pleasure in the texts themselves. The impression of vagueness carried through to a Schubert setting of the "Salve regina," a piece whose affect of seraphic serenity can turn into mere stasis at the slightest misstep. Banse crossed the line more than once, though the very end of the work, exquisitely inflected, held the audience rapt.

Conductor Christoph Poppen's note on his own string-orchestra transcription of Mendelssohn's F-minor quartet gave two justifications for the project: that the piece is well-suited to orchestration, and that it needs to be better known. He is right on both counts.

These days string quartets are being turned into string orchestra pieces left and right, almost always to their harm. It is a rare quartet that doesn't seem somehow smaller when played by twenty strings rather than four. But Mendelssohn's Op. 80 is a rare quartet. Written immediately after the composer's sister's early death, it is anguished, agitated, and (most unusually for Mendelssohn) not quite convincing formally-the outer movements sit raging in their tonic key far longer than the fastidious composer ordinarily would have allowed.

Several of Mendelssohn's quartets use what some call "orchestral" effects--busy accompanying textures, over which the first violin, more often than not, spins the melody. But in most of them the image, as it were, of the lone violin overleaping the teeming texture underneath is central to the music; orchestration would ruin them. The "orchestral" spirit, by contrast, is everywhere in the F-minor quartet. Every line is caught up in the work's frenzy and pain, and for once, adding more players to the lines made the music stronger rather than weaker.

Not that there weren't losses. The velvety warmth of the Munich players in the slow movement took the last edge off that movement's bitterness, and the rocking motif of the Scherzo's trio seemed less sinister, more reassuringly human, when played by four violas rather than one. But the outer movements' ferocity and passion were as intense as they could have been in a quartet performance, and all the more powerful with the massed strength of the Munich strings.

The best was saved for very last. As encore, the orchestra played the finale of Bartok's Divertimento for strings with such bite and enthusiasm that I immediately wished they'd brought the whole piece. Concertmaster Muriel Cantoreggi's sound had earlier struck me as almost alarming, with its wide and very fast vibrato; but in the Gypsy cadenza of the Bartok she spun that sound deftly into a parody of itself. The cadenza, like the whole movement, was exhilarating in its high spirits.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved