San Francisco Classical Voice

Last weekend's concerts marked the end of the New Century Chamber Orchestra's 1998-99 season, as well as the retirement of the orchestra's founder and Music Director, Stuart Canin. * The program, as I heard it Thursday night, May 20, at Berkeley's First Congregational Church, was typical of the NCCO's work under Canin's direction: an imaginative selection of music, thoughtfully prepared and, on the whole, brilliantly played.

The program's big discovery, for me, was David Diamond's 1944 Rounds for string orchestra. It's strange that so attractive a piece should be so little known. The harmonic language is identifiably "American" -- very like Copland, but without quite that "salute-the-flag" patriotic edge. The string textures, on the other hand, suggest Britten in an especially good mood. The fast mixed meters of the outer movements give an effect of gentle syncopation. Diamond has effectively used harmonics and pizzicato. And also -- a lovely touch, this -- just a little whiff of the bluegrass fiddle tradition, a touch of bariolage here, a pentatonic tune there.

It is all utterly un-self-conscious, completely unlike the heavy-handed pop-culture references of a more recent generation of composers. The overall impression is of a sort of lively serenity (leavened by the slow movement, a more somber relative of the opening of Appalachian Spring). The NCCO played with the kind of group dynamic that larger and more anonymous ensembles can only envy. Whole sections swayed as one with the dancing, shifting meters of the first movement.

Another under-performed work for strings provided the concert's incandescent finale. Today it is rare to hear Ernst Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 played outside of youth orchestra programs. The NCCO's performance, with Roy Bogas on the substantial obbligato piano part, made me wonder why. The Concerto is not particularly "searching" music, perhaps -- but then, neither are dozens of pieces with much firmer slots in the standard repertoire. And it is superbly "effective" music, music that worms its way into the listener on the slightest exposure.

I dimly recall having read this piece with an amateur orchestra several years back. It was a shock to discover how familiar it all seemed, how immediate. It is the kind of music that lives with you long after you think you have forgotten it. And, of course, it's supremely well-designed for strings.

The NCCO lit into it with even greater gusto than they had the Diamond. (The violas in particular were extraordinary; you would not have thought that three violists could ever make so much sound.) At first I thought the triumphant ending of the third movement was a bad miscalculation; it sounded as though the work ought to end right there. But the fugal finale managed to top it.

Charles Wuorinen's 1971 Grand Bamboula, which opened the concert, unfortunately came nowhere near the fun level promised by its title. The performance was prefaced by a few words from one of the players, who told us that a bamboula is a Cajun dance of celebratory character. Wuorinen's own note, reprinted in the program booklet, candidly explains that he merely borrowed the title from a piano piece of Louis Moreau Gottschalk because he liked the sound of the words, and that no other allusion is intended.

The music itself belongs proudly to the genre that a friend of mine, a dedicated new-music performer, affectionately calls "cranky-ass music." It's not just that the music is harmonically austere; it's that it refuses to provide any mental handholds, be they harmonic, motivic, or orchestrational. The motivic material is jagged and full of wide intervals. Just as well for this conductorless orchestra, the work has a more-or-less constant rhythmic pulse.

Some six minutes or so pass by, teeming with activity, but with hardly an identifiable "event" to be grasped. Then there is a long unison G, which sounds as if it might signal an end; then a frantic, chromatic sixteenth-note scrambling from the whole orchestra. "Finally," I thought, "something is really happening." But in another thirty seconds the piece is over. It's a cruel tease.

But the real disappointment of the evening was Mahler's Adagietto. The piece is all simplicity, stillness, and tenderness; the NCCO's performance Thursday was choppy, blustery, and overwrought. Balances were ill-judged, with lines suddenly heaving into prominence as they picked up the melodic skein, rather than emerging naturally.

And nearly everything was too loud. The exaggerated richness of the sound suggested that the NCCO was doing its best to sound like a much larger orchestra, but if so, the effort backfired. A large orchestra, paradoxically, can play more quietly than a small one; its players are not burdened with the need to make, at all times, a soloistically acceptable sound. Here, warmth and amplitude of vibrato substituted for sheer numbers. But the sound that resulted was blatant and ill-blended (Canin, in particular, stood out damagingly from the first violins), and Mahler's dynamics were bargained away in the tradeoff.

When, after wandering through many keys, the music finds its way back to the opening F major, Mahler's marking (for the first time in the movement) is ppp. The NCCO violins and violas began their downward glissando as a whisper, but hit bottom at a respectable mezzo-forte and with a hefty vibrato accent. And so it went throughout. The rare expressive voice of the Adagietto, furtive and fragile, did not survive.

The NCCO's conductorless nature is one of its points of pride (it was with great reluctance that the orchestra brought in a conductor to help with an exceptionally difficult work earlier this season), and so I am hesitant to say what follows. But the assistance of a conductor might have been able to make the Mahler succeed.

A conductor might have smoothed out the textures, controlled the dynamics, fine-tuned the rhythmic ebb and flow of the performance. The energy the players spent guessing the location of the next downbeat might have been put to better use. Much of the crudeness of the NCCO performance, I suspect, stemmed from the players' attempts to give one another rhythmic cues to follow -- cues that might more easily, and with less disruption of the musical flow, have come from a baton.

The program booklet, incidentally, provided long first-person profiles of most of the musicians, but failed to identify the excellent harpist in the Mahler (Michael Rado).

(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

* Correction:It has subsequently been pointed out that the New Century Orchestra was actually founded by Miriam Perkoff and Wieslaw Pogorzelski in 1992 together with Stuart Canin who was the first music director.