San Francisco Classical Voice

SYMPHONY REVIEW A Comeback With Ohlsson in Brahms

March 18, 2000

Garrick Ohlsson

By Robert P. Commanday

Hope springs renewably in the heart of the inveterate concertgoer. Pleasant surprise is often reward enough, as it was Saturday night with the Peninsula Symphony at the Flint Center, Cupertino. Because this is a volunteer orchestra, albeit a flourishing one with half-century's history, "major" performance results weren't expected, nor were they produced in the concert's first half. Exposed in the open sunlight of Copland's Appalachian Spring and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, the principal players, divided between the pretty good ones and the not so, weren't quite up to snuff

But along came pianist Garrick Ohlsson and the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1, in D minor, and the evening was made with a more-than-creditable performance. Conductor Mitchell Sardou Klein's grasp of the work, and his careful and close attention, particularly to the coordination with Ohlsson, were important. Possibly inspired by Ohlsson's playing, the players seemed to be listening more intently than they had earlier. Also, the Brahms score is more cohesive than the other two works, encouraging focus on the larger sonorities, and with the principals' solo lines integrated into a supporting whole, not so nakedly exposed as in the Copland and even the Rimsky.

In any case, Ohlsson's astute interpretation keyed the performance. He treated the lyrical and personal sides of the work delicately, intimately, on the scale of Brahms' Intermezzi, leaving the big, forceful statements to stand as framework and contrast, but not as the dominant factor. Ohlsson then elevated the inward feeling, the meditative ideas, the graceful, decorative gestures. This was the important stuff to him, made more so against the rigidity, theatricality and formality of the big chordal and double-octave rhetoric. It was a musical metaphor, analogous to the victory of the piano (the individual) in winning over the orchestra (larger forces) in the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.

In fact, there was in this performance more that connected Brahms First Piano Concerto with Beethoven than is customarily noticed. And it was airy, not even weighted down by the fudgy, indeterminate sound of the lower strings' bass line.

Opening the program on its theme of springtime, assistant conductor Howard Rappaport, led the Appalachian Spring Suite knowledgeably and precisely. He developed a good sense of continuity and flow through the episodic and changeable score, while protecting its sensitive atmospheric moods. There were moments when a picked-up tempo might have freshened the piece. "It's a gift to be simple," as the words go for the Shaker tune Copland made famous in this ballet score. It's also a gift to play the trumpet lead clean, fine and true as is absolutely required by the style. To paraphrase that hymn's subsequent line, "It's by tuning, tuning we come �round right."

Klein conducted the Russian Easter Overture in good style and pacing, his conducting perhaps overzealous to emphasize the showiness of the piece and encourage big sonority and splash. While not very smooth and free of flaws, it was lively and multi-colored performance.

Leaving aside the glory and obvious excellences of the professional ensembles, volunteer orchestras, of which this is a healthy exemplar, play a wonderful role, and obviously gave genuine gratification to the keenly supportive near-capacity audience at Flint Center. For the hundred or so musicians up there, it might not be the day job but the real one. Worth a one-hundred mile round trip to witness.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)