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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
Orpheus & Marsalis Kick Back in France
April 1, 2001
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By Heuwell Tircuit
Neglected repertory, sterling performances, and one mildly amusing goof highlighted Sunday's concert of the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Davies Hall. If that were not enough, there was the additional delight of saxophonist Branford Marsalis as a major soloist in four of the six works.
The orchestra opened with an exquisitely played rendition of Fauré's Pavane, Op. 50. Marsalis then joined them for Ibert's spiffy Concerto da camera and the important saxophone role in Milhaud's La Création du monde, Op. 81. Following intermission, the French theme continued with Pierre-Max Dubois' Concerto for Alto Saxophone and violinist Ronnie Bauch's orchestration of two movements from Debussy's Children's Corner Suite — "The Little Shepherd" and "Golliwog's Cakewalk." Then it was back to an Orpheus specialty, the suite from Stravinsky's comic ballet Pulcinella.
Branford Marsalis, who recently joined the faculty of San Francisco State University, is one of the famous New Orleans clan of musicians that is equally at home in the jazz and the classical worlds. His trumpeter brother Wynton has had more exposure, but Branford's playing is every bit in the same class.
A Classical Orchestra That Can Swing Jazz has become a highly specialized style that extends back nearly a century. It's as historically classical a reality as polytonality, atonality, or any form of rhythmic freedom that has popped up during that period. Thus Jazz can no longer be considered a mere pops form. Indeed, it is no longer the purely commercial idiom it was 60 years ago. A leading jazz virtuoso playing concert concertos with style and accuracy is no more surprising than the Orpheus musicians' obvious comfort in "swinging" Milhaud's jazz fugue and blues cadences. The larger point is that of quality musicianship, wherever it can be found, in whatever style. The cadenzas Marsalis played in each concerto were suspiciously long and elaborately virtuoso. It would appear that the soloist was honoring the old tradition of personalizing the solo passages with a bit of embellishment. I could be wrong (I have neither score handy to check), but I doubt that either Ibert or Dubois invented or asked for such amazing flurries. There was nothing destructive in this, for it was all so musically and tastefully accomplished. The Ibert concerto remained as it always was, ideal music to accompany a balloon trip over vineyards. The most unusual item of the evening was the Dubois Concerto. A Milhaud pupil, Dubois (1930–1995) spent most of his career as a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatory. His catalog is dominated by concertos and chamber music, most of them for wind instruments. There's an unusual set of quartets, one for four flutes, others for four horns, four clarinets, four trombones. (There's also a 1969 Concerto for Four Saxophones and Orchestra!) Curiously, Dubois turned out no string quartet. He belonged to the "find a need and fill it" school, turning out well-built, neo-Classical works in the French eclectic manner.
The long, slow introduction to his Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings, for example, toys with the trigger of atonality. That was no more than a glance over the shoulder, however, aimed at Messiaen's quasi-modal style. Most of the concerto stuck pretty much to traditions associated with Les Six, a style somewhere between those of Milhaud and Honegger. Nice piece. No masterpiece mind you, but nothing remotely tedious. Marsalis played all his contributions from the printed music. There's obvious danger in that. At one point during the Dubois first movement, the score fell off the stand. Marsalis kept playing, as the concertmaster left his chair to scoop up the music and replace it on the stand. No problem there. But it was apparently a fold-in set of pages, so two-thirds through the finale, Marsalis turned the page to find it wasn't the page he needed. The performance had to stop. Marsalis apologized, straightened the music, and then continued. (The audience just laughed.) The score fell off the stand a second time at the work's conclusion. In lighthearted fashion, Marsalis stomped on the music a few time — basta beast, basta! (More laughter.) The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is something extra special, amazingly uniform in ensemble and as richly warm in timbre as the Boston Symphony of old. The sheer strength of string sound is uncanny, considering they seat a 5-4-4-3-2 string section. That was about the size of the average string section during the late 18th century and most of the 19th century.
As the Strings Even with the glory of that string section, I should mention the often-sensational solo woodwinds. There were passages as fine as such moments get, such as the solo flute lines in the Fauré, the oboe singing Milhaud's poignant solos, and the clarinetist's saucy jazz licks. But alas, I cannot name names since the orchestra uses a rotation system. The concertmaster for the Fauré, for instance, moved to the last stand of second violins for the Ibert concerto. The one selection that seemed a bit crass was the Debussy excerpts. The instrumentation was very fine, with Marsalis playing soprano saxophone during "The Little Shepherd" and switching back to alto for the "Cakewalk." But both movements struck me as too fast to project their innate charm. In the case of the little pastoral opener, the performance was also far too loud. Nor did they make much of Debussy's ragging of Wagner's "Tristan" embedded in the "Cakewalk." There were no encores. (Basta!) (Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.) ©2001 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved |