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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
January 2, 2004
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By Heuwell Tircuit
While always ideally polished, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra has got to be one of the Bay Area's most admirable ensembles. It serves music rather than exploiting it. The fact that some of the musicians have day jobs unrelated to music only shows that they are performing for the sheer love of playing their instruments, and of music itself. They've a history of presenting unhackneyed programming and lesser-known soloists. Friday's Herbst Theater repeat of their Berkeley New Year's program under conductor Benjamin Simon illustrated the point.
Simon's program opened with Handel's terse “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” prelude to Act III of his oratorio Solomon. That was followed by Haydn's obscure concert aria “Scena di Berenice” and Mendelssohn's early Violin Concerto in D Minor. Mezzo-soprano Sally Porter Munro soloed in the Haydn, and the remarkable 12-year-old violinist Evie Chen — currently a student as Palo Alto's J. I. Stanford Middle School — was featured in the Concerto. The second half presented Porter Munro singing “Parto, parto” from Mozart's Clemenza di Tito and fighting a heavy-handed orchestration of Schubert's “An die Musik,” before Simon closed the concert with Haydn's zany Symphony No. 60 in C Major, “Il Distratto.” (Clarinetist Marilyn Martella, unlisted on the program face, assisted in a superb obbligato to the Mozart aria.)
Porter Munro, a regular member of the San Francisco Opera chorus, has sung with most of the Bay Area's opera companies and has taken a couple small roles in SF Opera productions. Most secure in her lower register, she struck me as more mezzo than soprano, indeed a potential alto. Her ascents into the upper register sounded a bit strained, and her intonation suffered accordingly. That flaw was never extreme enough to bother most ears, but it became an irksome element for some of us. While things improved, notably in the Mozart aria, the Haydn sounded distinctly uneasy and a tad over-dramatized.
Simon offered fine support throughout the evening, although the thick instrumentation of the Schubert song seemed to outdo him as well as the vocalist. Perhaps he was at his best with that marvelously inventive Haydn symphony, one of the few of his early works to muster many performances these days. There was even a time when the San Francisco Ballet presented Lou Christensen's setting of it. As far as I know, this was the first symphony derived from a stage work — a comic play, “Der Zerstreute” (The Absent-minded One). Haydn expanded that music into this six-movement symphony, which consists of a mainly regular four-movement work (with a kicky gypsy-style fourth movement), followed by two tagged-on, unlikely joke movements. The fifth movement, for instance, is marked “Adagio (of Lamentation),” but what one hears is as sunny and happy a piece as any romanza in the repertory. Then there's the unprecedented finale, always good for an audience laugh. It begins in quick tarantella fashion, marked prestissimo. But sixteen bars into the music, there's a full stop of two and a half bars. Haydn then wrote out a tuning exercise for all the violins: descending fifths on the open strings down to the lower two, and then having them silently tune the G-string down to F and then, bowing, back up to G as if they'd all let the string slide. That done, the movement starts all over again.
Simon decided to dramatize this, not at all subtly. He had concertmaster Bill Barbini stand as if tuning the entire orchestra; meanwhile, Simon placed his hands over his ears and pretended dismay and shock. Haydn's joke is obvious enough as is, without such exaggerated underlining. No cool, guys! Further on the debit side, the Handel was overly quick, depriving the music of its majesty. This is, after all, music for the entrance of a royal. The Queen of Sheba would hardly race into Solomon's court. So Simon's hurried tempo seems neither musically nor logically judged. Most of the orchestral playing was quite good, with minor itchy intonation or ensemble problems here and there. The more consistent bother came from the two horns, who sounded not quite house-broken. The bloopers were pretty glaring, especially during Haydn's high horn writing in the symphony. Some may have thought that another of Haydn's written-out jokes, but this was not at all what he intended. Still, the end result was a fun evening, much of it devoted to works one rarely, if ever, encounters. And, of course, there was a chance to hear the rather startling Chen play the early Mendelssohn Concerto, which is a demanding piece.
(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.)
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Benjamin Simon