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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
The Modern Baroque, A. D. 2001
December 1, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
What's a countertenor doing running around with a modern-instrument chamber orchestra? Well, what are “modern” singers like Dawn Upshaw and Cecilia Bartoli doing appearing with period-instrument orchestras? But Andreas Scholl's appearance with New York's conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Saturday night at Davies Symphony Hall was not the only thing on the program that set me to thinking about the “period” and the “modern.”
The near-conquest of the baroque repertory by period-instrument players left “modern” musicians that play baroque music in a curious and uncomfortable position. They knew that everything they do was going to be compared against the new “mainstream.” How to react? For reaction there had to be; anything you did would be read with reference to the new norm, and going on exactly as you did before was in itself a decision, probably the most difficult choice of all. It became impossible to treat baroque music unselfconsciously “just as music.” Every performance in some way took a stand, even if it was no more than “We are just going to ignore this until it goes away.”
That not being particularly interesting or (for that matter) fun, other solutions were more popular. Outright defiance, of course — some players just dug in their heels, and if anything made their playing slower, grander, and beefier. Many more tried to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Okay, tastes have changed; how do we adapt?
Not very well, to judge from most of the “modern” baroque playing I've heard over the last decade. The pitfalls for players are everywhere. Sometimes they succumb to what some of us call Stupid Ornament Disease (SOD for short): “We must ornament, they all say so, so just do something, anything.” The “anythings” generated this way are better left undescribed. More often, players are just too scared of reproach for “inauthenticity” to do anything not specified in the score. Modern-instrument baroque playing has gotten increasingly timid and literalistic, just at the same time that period-instrument playing has gotten uncommonly wild and free. The old-school players who once denounced “historical performance” as desiccated Puritanism must regard the wackier exploits of (say) Andrew Manze or Fabio Biondi as insanity run rampant. In some cases I'm not even sure they'd be wrong, but I'll take fascinating lunacy over staid sanity of the playing-on-autopilot kind any day.
So . . . Orpheus? For the first half of the concert, I thought that this immensely resourceful chamber orchestra had this immensely difficult problem licked, or near to it anyway. The Corelli “Christmas” Concerto (Op. 6/8) got baroque modern-instrument playing of the best kind — vigorous, incisive, not in the least afraid of sounding indulgent in the slow movement (bravo to the gutsy violas especially), not afraid to take the final “Pastorale” at an unusually slow speed. It was blissfully SOD-free: no ornaments at all, actually, except in the one place that demanded them (the two silent pauses in the Pastorale) and there they were simple, gentle scales in the violin and then the lute. The one false note was in the first Allegro, where suspension-chains that any self-respecting baroque musician would've laid into were treated on tippy-toes. Better yet than the Corelli was the Telemann flute/bassoon double concerto after it, mostly because of bassoonist Frank Morelli, who obviously has the kind of fun doing his work that those of us with ordinary day jobs can hardly dream of. His lyrical and agile and ardent and comic bassoon (yes, all four, and sometimes within seconds of one another) was just a marvel. Susan Palma-Nidel's flute playing didn't hit me quite the same way, but then her instrument doesn't offer the same opportunities. The Bach Fifth Brandenburg Concerto that ended the program wasn't in the same league, alas. Partly it was the balance: Robert Wolinsky's harpsichord hadn't much of a chance against the Orpheus strings, even though some of the violins sat the piece out. (He compensated with playing of exceptional verve and velocity — the chromatic spin-out in the cadenza accelerated so violently that there were little gasps and chuckles of amazement from the audience.) But the bigger trouble was the smooth, slick playing of the two other soloists, Palma-Nidel and violinist Eric Wyrick. Wyrick in particular seemed not to understand that long notes in Bach are always part of a longer line that is going somewhere, and that the one thing you can't do is just sit there pouring out sound at constant volume, however beautiful that sound might be in the abstract. The finale suffered least from this, and here his sharp and canny articulation was a pleasure.
The rest of the program was devoted to countertenor Andreas Scholl, who was clearly the reason much of the audience was there. We're now in a Golden Age of countertenors (at least, it will seem so until the next crop arrives), and it's a little shocking to realize how fast that happened. Countertenors — falsettists — have been around for decades, but countertenors with reliable technique are new. To be precise, they became known to the world in 1995, when a complete unknown named Andreas Scholl recorded a disc of music by other complete unknowns, German composers that might have turned up in a very rigorous music history course, but nowhere else. Scholl was news then. Never mind the repertory: here was a guy who sang beautifully, and infallibly in tune! None of this what-will-happen-on-the-next-note? business. He is not unique any more (we have David Daniels, Robin Blaze, Yoshizaku Mera, and a host of others), but he was the first one could count on like that: the first who could spin forth that sound so that one knew that nothing would go wrong, anywhere. The first one could rely on to hit a note squarely; the first who, to put it crudely, didn't put all his audience in prospective cringe-mode, waiting for a disaster that might or might not come.
The Scholl of that 1995 album has matured a good deal. The three Handel arias he sang Saturday night showed a voice as bewitchingly clear as ever, but stronger, more forthright, and yet more secure. His legato is now pretty well faultless, and he moves around his considerable range without any hint that there might be a break in it. The obligatory “Ombra mai fu” (known more widely as “Handel's Largo”) was seamless, pure, and serene. The other two arias were “Dove sei?” from Rodelinda and “Va tacito” from Giulio Cesare — the former a slow piece in Handel's magical E-major mood (think “I know that my Redeemer liveth”), the latter a jaunty duet with a concertato horn, where Scholl's clarion tones and the horn's were eerily close in timbre. After intermission followed more Scholl: a bevy of arrangements of British folksongs by one C. Leon — not otherwise identified, even as to gender, in the program notes. I wish I knew more, for the arrangements seemed tailored to the group (bringing in, for example, the lute and the harpsichord). And most of them managed to be interesting but not obtrusive, which is rare enough that the arranger deserves credit. A little folksy parallel-fifth stuff goes a long way with me, but here I didn't mind it. The one arrangement that didn't seem to me to work well was the last, “Down by the Salley Garden,” where the accompaniment was too active and fussy for the tune. Scholl's English diction is very fine for a non-native speaker (a few vowels were off, nothing more), and that extraordinary pure timbre was wondrous in the more pensive songs. In the more vigorous ones there was a little understandable technical caution, but the tone was full and brave as ever. The encore, another ballad, gave Scholl the opportunity to drop into the baritone register that he hadn't used all evening, to general delight. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |