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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 21, 2005
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By David Bratman
With its music director Nicholas McGegan off guest conducting elsewhere, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's October concerts were led by another early-music specialist conductor, Jordi Savall, in a program featuring two composers from his own nation of Spain. This period-instrument ensemble often ventures beyond its namesake era into the high classics and, with the second of these composers, almost toppled over the edge into the Romantics. I heard the last of five performances, at Palo Alto's First United Methodist Church on Friday.
Luigi Boccherini was the high classicist on the program. Italian by birth, he came to Spain in 1769 at the age of 26 to work for the royal court and never left. Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, born in 1806, the year after Boccherini's death, was a precocious Spaniard from the Basque country. He went to Paris to study at the conservatory before dying there – worn out by tuberculosis, overwork, and the mere burden of being a child genius – a few days before his 20th birthday. Boccherini is not often heard, and Arriaga is almost forgotten even in Spain, so Savall and the Philharmonia gave us the rare opportunity to hear the case for the two most important composers from Spain working in the century of 1750-1850.
One doesn't expect late 19th century nationalism from music this early, but a trace of Spanish folk style can be detected in some of Arriaga's work. As for Boccherini, this enthusiastic immigrant was the stepfather of Spanish nationalism, writing recognizably Spanish-sounding music a century before Albéniz and Falla. Above all, his nationalist music is fun. Viewers of the film Master and Commander will remember the scene at the end where Aubrey and Maturin, playing a lively chamber work together, turn their violin and cello on their sides and strum them like guitars. That was by Boccherini: it could hardly be anyone else's music. It's the passa calle section (it's a pun on "passacaglia") from his La Musica notturna di Madrid, a work we heard in full at this concert.
This short series of colorful portraits of Madrid townsfolk was originally written for string quintet. It was given here in an arrangement that combined string orchestra with touches of the chamber original. Jumping offhandedly between fast and slow parts, the piece teems with unexpected pizzicato notes and other clever gimmicks. Boccherini was a cellist himself. Here, and in an equally nationalist encore (the fandango movement from his String Quintet in D, Op. 40 No. 2, which he also transcribed for string quartet plus guitar), he gave both of Philharmonia's front-row cellists, Tanya Tomkins and Phoebe Carrai, a workout and a chance to shine. They didn't turn their instruments on their sides as the composer instructed, though the violinists did. The performance was crisp, lively, imaginative, and enjoyable.
Boccherini's Symphony in D Minor, Op. 37 No. 3, has no obvious Spanish traces but is recognizably from the same hand. It dates from 1787 but follows the manner of the "Sturm und Drang" symphonies of fifteen years earlier (think of Haydn's “Farewell” or Mozart's Little G Minor, K. 183): tight and nervous themes, bursts of fortissimo quavers, tiny pastoral slow movements. Savall was at his finest conducting this, keeping the orchestra on a knife-edge of precision, guiding the emotional effect by minute fluctuations in dynamics to produce ebb and flow in the music, using tempo change as a structural punctuation to set off landmarks in the work and give variety to repeats. The players responded with passion and commitment. From Arriaga we heard two works. First came the overture to his opera Los esclavos felices, one of those seraglio operas in the tradition of Mozart's "Abduction from the." The bulk of the music is lost – after Arriaga died his scores were stuck in a cupboard and many succumbed to mold, insects, and rats – but the overture survives and sounds exactly like a cheap knockoff of Rossini. It's even got a copy of Rossini's patented rhythmic-figure crescendos at the end. It just isn't as good as the originals. But we should give Arriaga a break – he was only 13 years old when he wrote it. His only symphony, composed in Paris at the more mature age of 18 or so, combines D Major and D Minor to such an unorthodox extent that reference books disagree about which key it's actually in. It's a small masterwork that's unjustly skipped over in most histories of the symphony simply because it's the only major 19th century work in the genre written by a Spaniard at all. Sometimes compared to the similarly dark-hued D Major symphony by Arriaga's teacher Luigi Cherubini, Arriaga's is a more lyrical work than Cherubini's jumpy, awkward piece. The composer I'm really, and almost startlingly, reminded of by this symphony is Schubert. The curve of the melodies, the doubling of flute with strings, the alternation of blaring tuttis with quiet interludes, could easily be from either of Schubert's two minor-key symphonies, the “Tragic” (No. 4) or the “Unfinished.” Other passages, such as the tossing around of a motif among the string instruments in the finale, show the influence of Beethoven; and there's a galloping diminuendo passage in the same movement that sounds as if Arriaga has foreseen Dvořák's “New World.”
Unfortunately the performance did not make the best possible case for this work. Savall brought to it little of the fine hand he'd shown with dynamic fluctuations and tempo changes in Boccherini. As the symphony, for all its virtues, is a bit thin in material relative to its length, it would have helped immensely to have shown more variety in a number of repeated sections, or simply to have cut the repeats. Boccherini had been played without any vibrato at all in the strings, which was fine for him; but the slight vibrato given to Arriaga was nevertheless too restrained at times. The work could have been tremendously effective with more Romantic emotional feeling on a couple of meltingly beautiful melodies – the second theme from the slow movement is fully worthy of Schubert himself – which came out thin and dry in this performance. The more dance-like parts were more successful: the flute solo in the trio, which reminds some scholars of a jota – it was nicely played on a period reproduction wooden instrument by Janet See – and the main theme of the finale, possibly Arriaga's attempt at a fandango. So if Philharmonia Baroque is not ready for Romantic music, it does have the rhythmic precision, and the bounce, of the livelier high classics down cold. So did the audience. Boccherini's fandango was but one of two encores. In the other, a contredanse by Rameau, Savall invited the audience to clap along during the refrain. We not only clapped when we were supposed to and not when we weren't, but we mostly hit the beats on time and together. This rarely happens with audience participation. We should give ourselves an A.
(David Bratman, librarian, lives with his lawfully-wedded soprano and a wallful of symphony recordings.)
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Jordi Savall
