San Francisco Classical Voice

There were a surprising number of empty seats at First Congregational Church Thursday night for the New Century Chamber Orchestra's season-opening concert. Can the names of two well-known twentieth-century composers, Arnold Schoenberg and John Adams, and one relatively unfamiliar one, Wallingford Riegger, have frightened potential listeners away? If so, they missed a treat, for this opening concert of the NCCO's first season under its new director/concertmaster, Krista Bennion Feeney, found the group sounding about as good as it ever has.

Chamber orchestra performances of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht have a tendency to fall between two stools, missing both the concentrated intensity of the sextet version and the sweep and power of a full orchestral string section. The NCCO, though, seemed almost to hit both incompatible targets at once. The unanimity of purpose and the wealth of detail in the phrasing suggested a veteran chamber ensemble, but the sound, while transparent, could also be startlingly powerful. The string solos set the tone, Feeney's soaring, richly-inflected playing complementing the dense, dark viola sound of Linda Ghidossi-deLuca.

A measure of the degree of care and thought that went into this performance was the decision to use old-fashioned wooden mutes, rather than the more common rubber sort. Unlike rubber mutes, the wooden ones have to be set aside somewhere when not in use, so they are both inconvenient and risky (a couple did clatter to the floor during Thursday's performance). But the sound they impart is distinctly different--more nasal, more ghostly--and in the extraordinary F-sharp-major passage midway through the piece, the effect was haunting.

John Adams, on hand to introduce his 1978 Shaker Loops, revealed that one Krista Bennion Feeney had taken part in the premiere performance, given by an ensemble of students at the San Francisco Conservatory. Revisiting the piece 21 years later, Feeney was dynamite. One felt that her muscular energy was powering the whole orchestra; her enthusiasm was infectious and her stamina downright awe-inspiring. If her colleagues' playing was not quite so physically demonstrative, nonetheless the collective sound was like an aural image of Feeney's playing style--bold and propulsive, bristling with electricity.

Like most minimalist music, Shaker Loops is hard to hear "from inside." The players' hands and brains are kept so busy getting out the torrent of notes that the longer trajectory--the slowly-shifting texture that is the music's fascination and its point--in a sense has to fend for itself. All the more remarkable, then, the smoothness and grace with which the NCCO's Shaker Loops evolved. The orderly onward rush of the music carried one forward irresistibly, so that the few really sharp disjunctions had, as they should, the effect of a shock.

The concert opened with an unexpected delight, Wallingford Riegger's 1926 Study in sonority for ten violins. Riegger is little more than a name to most musicians, unfortunately including myself, and I had no idea what to expect. The music turned out to be puzzling but undeniably interesting stuff. The Study in sonority is continuously restless, jumping unpredictably from still, acridly-harmonized chordal passages to jaunty episodes of pizzicato or eruptions of violent multiple-stopping. In one rather frightening passage, the whole ensemble converged, scrambling and screeching, on a single high D. Surprises are everywhere. (One particularly effective one came well into the piece, when a chord containing an "impossibly" low pitch revealed that one player tunes the bottom string down a third or so.)

Riegger only rarely deploys the whole ensemble at once. The violins enter and exit alone or in small teams whose membership is constantly changing. The effect is of a rather rowdy discussion rather than a concerted effort; indeed, much of the fun derives from each player's repeated opportunities to interrupt, upstage, or otherwise tussle with the rest. Study in sonority must be even more of a blast to play than to hear. The NCCO's violins (supplemented by Ghidossi-deLuca, in a rare appearance without a C-string) predictably played the pants off it.

There was one encore: Leopold Stokowski's uncharacteristically straightforward arrangement of the famous "Air" from Bach's third orchestral suite. The choice was evidently a welcome-back gift for cellist Emil Miland, who was on leave from the orchestra last year. Stokowski gives the solo cello (Miland) Bach's first violin part, leaving the first violins resting--the "Air on the A string," if you will.

On the repeats, all the violins together take up the top line, with the solo cello on the original second violin part. Miland's elegant handling of the solo was matched by suave and silky playing from the orchestra. It was a lovely performance. And coming as it did on the heels of the physical and mental tour de force of Shaker Loops, it was also a quietly effective final display of concentration. Not every orchestra could muster such serenity so soon after such exertion.

(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