|
CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
February 6, 2005
|
By Michelle Dulak Thomson
The New Century Chamber Orchestra has a well-deserved reputation for presenting difficult music in uncompromisingly sharp and
cogent performances. Their set last week was something of a holiday in the middle of the season: an all-20th-century program that
did everything humanly possible to be listener-friendly. If the ultimate vibe at Sunday's concert at Marin's Osher Jewish Community
Center was more "friendliness" in the manner of a store greeter, it wasn't the fault of the composers (all the music was excellent
on its own terms), nor of the players (who lit into some of their material with ferocious zeal), but simply the piling-up of so
much dessert in one two-hour stretch.
The name of Henry Cowell doesn't immediately suggest "sweet and frothy," but that's because his only well-known works are the
early, experimental piano pieces involving tone clusters, inside-the-piano strumming, and the like. The Variations on
Thirds, from the other end of his career, is a little suite in six movements for two violas (here, Linda Ghidossi-Deluca and
Cassandra Lynne Richburg) and strings, and it goes out of its way to be ingratiating. Too far out of its way, perhaps; the fourth-
movement Presto (which was not remotely "presto" on Sunday) was the sort of movement just designed to be encored, while the third-
movement Andante, a wannabe "Air on the G String," is seriously too pretty for its own good. You could too easily think of nifty
commercial uses for it.
But, then, that was true of nearly everything on the program. Lou Harrison's Suite for Symphonic Strings, with its seven
brief movements and their seven sharply distinct personae, is a strong and interesting piece; but even so, I couldn't quite help
thinking how nicely a couple of the unison-violin numbers (the opening Estampie, for one) would work as, say, segue music. It's
music that comes in lengths; it goes till it stops. It's uncommonly interesting while it goes, because the meter is irregular, and
even (as it were) irregularly irregular; but there's no particular reason for it to stop when it does. Just the kind of thing to
use a couple of seconds of, in fact; and if I wake up to a fragment of it covering a gap between items on NPR a couple of years
hence, I won't be a bit surprised.
That said, the unison-violin numbers were great fun, especially with NCCO's intense violins, and all the slapping-the-instrument and col-legno-behind-the-bridge stuff from the lower strings. There was also a heavily dissonance-laden chorale (somewhere between one of those sighing slow passages in a Copland ballet and the last of the Stravinsky Three Pieces for string quartet — that is, it seemed both to be resting and to be restless, which is rather remarkable). And a fugue, led by the violas. That, I'm afraid, was where I realized that NCCO could have used the "Symphonic Strings" of the title. This really isn't a piece for twenty players, however fine; there isn't the mass, or the cover. Eighty players would be more like it. On the other half of the program the principal soloist was guitarist David Tanenbaum. He has played Aaron Jay Kernis's 1999 Concierto de Dance Hits before with New Century, in 2000, but on that occasion it was without conductor. Indeed, New Century generally prides itself on not needing a conductor (I think they've used one on only one previous occasion), and so it was strange to see them resorting to one here after a previous, successful run of conductorless performances of the same piece with the same soloist. All the stranger that it was the composer himself, wearing a rather festive shirt with multicolored vertical stripes on it, and conducting a little stiffly and often a little behind the sound, as though following the orchestra rather than leading it. It's true that it's uncommonly difficult for a guitarist to give a cue, and so rather hard to coordinate a piece with the rhythmic intricacies of this one; still, Kernis's assistance seemed almost counterproductive in some places. The piece itself is nostalgic to the point where one starts having suspicions of it: is this just a very good composer of easy- listening music who has found a way to market that talent some ways up the prestige stream? Having heard a lot of Kernis, I'd have to say "no," but if the line between "commercial music" and "art music" is the line between sincerely loving the idiom and deliberately viewing it from a distance and messing with it ironically, I'm not quite sure where Kernis is. Nor, for that matter, where I'd rather he be. The material taken up in Concierto de Dance Hits is, in a way, so innocent that only a rather repulsive prig could manage "ironic distance" from it. On the other hand, it's not really the stuff of "art music" unless you try.
Certainly the audience Sunday wasn't in the ironic-distancing mood. They were loving it, from dramatic opening through soulful Bacharach-esque slow movement to salsa-flavored finale. Tanenbaum played with tremendous finesse and quite evident affection, and the orchestra was taut and brilliant. And then Astor Piazzolla's Double Concerto for guitar, bandoneón, and strings, with Tanenbaum again and Coco Trivisonno on the bandoneón (an instrument rather like an accordion, though it is best not actually to equate the two instruments in the presence of a bandoneónist). A sweet piece, and yet one with some kick in it, partly through the soloists, and partly through an orchestra that didn't seem to need a conductor here, mixed meters and all. Tanenbaum was brilliant, not only in the loudly passionate music, indeed especially in the quietest places (he plays the deftest, most delicate harmonics I've ever heard from a guitarist). Trivisonno, meanwhile, was a marvel of dynamic subtlety and sudden, sharp stabs of reedy color. The duo's encore (a guitar-and-bandoneón transcription of another Piazzolla number) was a fine and brilliant closer.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
|
David Tanenbaum
Aaron Jay Kernis