San Francisco Classical Voice

Musical reputations are strange things, dependent more than most music-lovers realize on the vicissitudes of institutional finances and of recording-industry priorities. Sunday's performance by the NDR (North German Radio) Symphony, Hamburg (under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach), and guest violinist Midori at Davies Symphony Hall was a case in point. More or less everyone with an interest in classical music knows about Midori. Rather few know anything of NDR Hamburg. Yet it was the orchestra that ultimately made the greater impression.

Midori's was a frustratingly skittish Tchaikovsky Concerto, one subject to alarming mood swings. Her best playing was in quiet, lyrical passages, where she was beguiling indeed, playing with an unbroken, suave legato and an ever-warm yet subtly varied vibrato. But such interludes rarely lasted long.

The brute gymnastics of this concerto are no problem for Midori, but projecting them is another matter. For a violinist in the star class, she has a surprisingly small basic sound, except indeed in legato (where she wields unexpected power). On Sunday she compensated repeatedly with fury and speed, resulting in a reading that tore moment by moment from sweet repose to violence, and more than once left the accompanying orchestra panting to catch up. A phrase would catch my breath with its intimate delicacy, only to be undermined a few seconds later by some sudden, slashing attack.

Let it be admitted at once that the Tchaikovsky Concerto is built to withstand, nay to invite, "slashing attacks" (the critic Hanslick, friend and champion of Brahms, famously complained of this concerto that in it the violin is "beaten black and blue"). But they work best with a red-blooded approach to the lyrical passages that is not Midori's way. As it was, the incessant veering between quietude and vehemence sounded more like a war between two violinists than a single narrative thread.

Nor did the vehement mode show Midori's technique at its best. In her haste, she often left climactic notes too quickly to give them the proper ring of vibrato. And in the finale (in which she took the traditional tiny cuts) her spiccato was so tight and vertical as to be nearly inaudible much of the time. That said, there was some glorious music-making in this Tchaikovsky, nowhere more than in the second-movement "Canzonetta," where Midori's lyrical gifts and the splendid coloristic resources of the orchestra came together to great effect.

This is an orchestra with a seductive sound. A public-transit snafu resulted in my missing the beginning of the concert-opening Euryanthe Overture of Weber, but what I heard of it boded well: a solid, alert body of strings not afraid to play a real pianissimo, tangy woodwinds, and bold brass. The quality of the orchestra was confirmed by the first bars of the Tchaikovsky — the suave first violin phrase leading to four perfect little chords from the full string section, velvety, warm, and vibrant. And in the next, parallel phrase it was the winds that shone. The NDR wind section really is that paradoxical marvel, a group of intensely individual players who are capable of blending well. In chorus they are in tune and ideally balanced, and sound like an especially attractive chamber organ. Individually they seem to rejoice in the possession of the quirky timbres of their particular instruments.

The latter virtue enlivened the Tchaikovsky considerably (never have I heard a performance where the details of Tchaikovsky's wind writing were so clear or so compelling to the ear). But it was even more valuable in the performance of Schoenberg's orchestration of the Brahms G-Minor Piano Quartet that ended the concert. Schoenberg's ingenious rescoring doesn't by any means simply transfer the piano part of the original to the winds. But it does often use them to handle what was originally keyboard figuration, and so demands of them flexibility and brilliance at once.

Only once or twice (mainly in the finale, with its many piano cadenzas) does Schoenberg fail to find a convincing orchestral substitute for the piano original. (Woodwind and pizzicato strings, his usual resort in the most blatantly pianistic bits, works surprisingly well, combining the piano's fluidity and its zing.) This remains a frustrating piece, though — just enough like a "fifth Brahms symphony" to get me listening in that mode, until the next orchestrational shock jarred me out again. It's not just the infamous xylophone and glockenspiel of the finale. It's the bass clarinet (in there from bar one), the contra, the tuba, the cymbals, and the insufferable triangle that tinkles its way through all four movements. I was constantly reminded (surely by design) that I was listening, not to Brahms, but to Brahms-plus.

Even so, it's luscious music. And Schoenberg the lover of counterpoint often saw potentials in the original that another arranger would not have. Many are the places where a subsidiary line, highlighted or raised in octave, suddenly seemed to have achieved its rightful position in the musical skein. There are miscalculations — I am thinking of a crowning violin phrase in the slow movement that is natural and expressive in the original octave but stilted and stiff in the higher octave Schoenberg gives it — but overall the piece is about as successful an orchestration of a piano-and-strings chamber work as there has ever been.

The performance was passionate and precise at once, granting to Brahms' warm-hearted melodies what they needed, yet sparing attention for Schoenberg's sometimes chilling orchestral effects (like the menacing muted trumpet blasts in a chromatic passage of the scherzo). The concertmaster and the principal violist and cellist had a brief solo turn toward the end of the finale that almost made me wish they and their music director had performed the Brahms original instead (Eschenbach has a fine reputation as a pianist).

There were two well-deserved encores: a bracing rendition of the last of Dvorak's Op. 46 Slavonic Dances, and an exhilarating performance of Smetana's "Dance of the Tumblers" from the opera The Bartered Bride.

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

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved