San Francisco Classical Voice

EARLY MUSIC REVIEW Romantic Zest and Zeal

November 10, 2001

By Jeff Rosenfeld

Philharmonia Baroque doesn't just do baroque. In fact, in last week's concerts the early instrument orchestra didn't play any baroque, instead moving on to the 19th century. On evidence of Sunday's performance at Berkeley's First Congregational Church, the romantic fervor suited the group well under the leadership of principal conductor Nicholas McGegan. Maybe a little too well.

The concert began promisingly with Ludwig van Beethoven's incidental music for Goethe's play, Egmont. From the famous opening chord of the overture, Philharmonia Baroque displayed the kind of muscle one expects with Beethoven — brasses smooth and solid, strings husky and bold in all registers, winds clean and forward. The sound was beautifully integrated, the intonation pure, and the articulation meanwhile was as lithe as we've come to expect from these early music specialists.

If McGegan didn't quite elicit the requisite dramatic hush in the quiet moments, there was plenty of power to burn on the loud side with only the slightest loss of clarity. There were specific advantages to hearing this group in this famous music: the sweet, unabrasive tone of Stephen Schultz's piccolo riffs in the coda, for instance, or the mellow, warm fanfares from trumpeters John Thiessen and Fred Holmgren. Overall this swift but not rushed opening perfectly portrayed the fiery zeal for liberty and patriotism that motivated Goethe and likeminded 19th century greats, including Beethoven.

From there the incidental music, mostly a series of arias and entr'actes, seemed to get only better right from the stirring call to arms of Todd Manley's timpani and sidedrum. The third entr'acte and “Clärchens Tod” featured exquisite cadenzas and other extended solos from oboist Marc Schachman. And the soft playing that was lacking in the overture belatedly emerged as the orchestra sensitively accompanied mezzo-soprano Elza van den Heever in her two arias, “Die Trommel geruhret!” and “Freudvoll und leidvoll.” The soloist — still in her early 20s and studying at the San Francisco Conservatory — was suitably ardent and tasteful, rather than dramatically overwhelming, in this relatively undemanding music. Her voice had great presence over the orchestra and she sang with superb control and diction and focused, elegant tone

Emphasis on the Pulse

Two things about the Beethoven turned out to be a hint of things to come in the performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in the second half. First, I don't think anything Beethoven wrote sounded more like the future wunderkind Mendelssohn than the fourth entr'acte of the Egmont, with its catchy tune and surging, active rhythmic base. Second, the concluding “Siegessinfonie,” which reprises military strains from the overture, somehow sounded galumphing and insistent, rather than inspiring as it had earlier. The brass and percussion in particular seemed a little overbearing on the beat. Somehow this malaise spread in the Mendelssohn that followed.

This isn't to say that the performance of the “Scottish” Symphony was plodding or even unsuccessful. In fact, Nicholas McGegan seemed to have rare measure of the music. His strong conception of the work included a keen sense of rhythmic vitality — which is essential and, anyway, hard to miss in most Mendelssohn. Even more distinctive was the clarity with which the orchestra registered every part, including the effervescent scherzo assai vivace which ripped along at a fevered pace. Occasionally the horns, playing with brilliant accuracy, noticeably lacked the tone to cut through the rest of the group, but this chamber-sized orchestra (only three double basses) was just right for lightness and speed. The adagio cantabile was a big success, starting from William McColl's graceful, light approach to the clarinet solo melody, matched by the strings in their own melodic lines.

McGegan seemed to stress the zippy side of Mendelssohn, with gratifyingly quick tempi and phrases that were emphatically chopped up into short, dancable fragments. The enthusiastic push and pull of notes and the clean separations between groupings of notes is now customary in the playing of Bach, but we rarely hear this approach in 19th century music. It was delightful, especially in such unanimous and alert playing — in fact the carefully shaped woodwind section chords in the first movement were as sweetly and sensitively done as I've ever heard them.

As a result, however, the music also sometimes hopped along with so much zest that it lost some of its momentum and sweep and cantabile feel. Perhaps in compensation as the performance wore on, and especially in the last movement, the orchestra began to seem even more and more insistent on the beat. Trumpets, percussion, and sometimes others hammered too enthusiastically at the pulse when the music would have been better off driving with lightness toward its conclusion. The orchestra, having proven its expressive power for this high-octane music, seemed to revel in some imagined romantic excess. Overzealous but definitely zesty, the result was a near miss of a great performance.

(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)