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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
December 30, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
A wild collage of music spanning three centuries, held together tenuously by the three themes of "Mozart," "trios," and "general mayhem," might not sound like a good formula around which to design a concert. But it's an excellent recipe for a grand, if early, New Year's celebration, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, with the Jacques Thibaud String Trio as guest soloists, pulled it off admirably Friday night at Herbst Theatre. The juxtapositions may not always have made sense, but who wants anything to make sense around the New Year?
The Thibaud Trio — violinist Burkhard Maiss, violist Philip Douvier, and cellist Bogdan Jianu — has visited the Bay Area several times before. The difference this time was that they were reading from music. In any other ensemble, that would be unremarkable, but these are musicians who took the trouble to learn the Schoenberg String Trio by heart — a heroic quest if ever there was one. I have never seen them play anything from parts before.
They were brilliant all the same. In Mozart's violin/viola/cello Sinfonia concertante (K. 320e), which closed the program, they were more than brilliant: They made the piece sound as though Mozart had written the whole thing. In fact, it's a fragment, completed by one Otto Bach nearly a century after Mozart's death. Mozart, as happens so often in his fragments, dropped the project just at the start of the development section, and there's hardly anything in the world harder to fake than a Mozart development section. Otto Bach evidently modeled his on the parallel section in the violin/viola Sinfonia concertante, but it still sounds a little contrived. It's a great Mozart "might-have-been," although not an entirely satisfactory piece as reconstructed. But with the Thibaud Trio, energetically bantering away musically with one another, and the crisp SFCO supporting them, the Sinfonia concertante seemed wholly real, wholly Mozart.
 The Trio (and the trio theme) also appeared earlier in the program, in Jean Françaix's 1933 String Trio. Françaix is better known as a composer of frothy wind music, but this work translates the froth for strings, delightfully. The opening "moto perpetuo" is a piece of airy persiflage for muted strings; the succeeding three movements, all short, are likewise character pieces of one kind or another. The whole work was charming, ingenious, and, incidentally, uncommonly considerate toward the players. I have heard more than one wind player say that Françaix's wind music is "grateful" to play, written as it is so idiomatically for the instruments. Somehow I didn't expect the same from his string music, but if this trio is representative of the rest, it's so. The concert opened with the overture to Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne, written when the composer was 11. Whenever this overture is performed, someone always points out that the theme sounds like the opening theme of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. Indeed, SFCO director Benjamin Simon went so far as to suggest lightly in his spoken introduction to the concert that Beethoven "stole" the theme from Mozart. That little ritual aside, the performance was stylish and technically impeccable. Further Mozartiana followed: two sets of variations on "Là ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni — one by Danzi for cello and orchestra, one by Beethoven for two oboes and English horn. The soloist in the bubbly Danzi was Dana Putnam Fonteneau, an articulate, deft, and occasionally whimsical cellist who struggled once or twice when the part took her into the heights, but otherwise was obviously having a great time. The Beethoven was played by oboists Robin May and Peter Lemberg and English hornist James Matheson (replacing the indisposed Janet Archibald). It's a monstrous technical challenge for both oboists — Beethoven allows the second to think he's getting off lightly until late in the piece. May and Lemberg carried off the parts magnificently. Matheson was excellent, too, although his exceedingly reedy sound took some getting used to.
The real "odd man out" in the program was Osvaldo Golijov, whose Last Round for nine strings followed the Beethoven. I'm not quite sure what this tango-suffused duel between two string quartets (with a bass as mediator) was doing in this company, but at any rate it was splendidly played, with the kind of street swagger you wouldn't expect from a classical band. The slow second movement was also fine, sustained without evident strain and yet always intense. After the winner of a lottery done at intermission mounted the podium to conduct two verses of "Auld Lang Syne" for an audience singalong, a short Piazzolla encore followed from the orchestra. All in all, it was a concert to warm the heart, and to brace the audience for the turbulent weather awaiting them outside the hall.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)
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