San Francisco Classical Voice

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW Symphony Players in Small Groups

May 5, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

Sunday's San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players' concert might almost have been designed as an allegory. Take a bunch of orchestral players and ask them to play chamber music, and what do you get? Small groups spontaneously forming around music they love? Large groups tackling pieces that only a large body of players like the Symphony can make possible? Or just people who can, in principle, play anything, playing the standard chamber rep in an unimpeachable manner? All three, Sunday afternoon at Davies Symphony Hall.

Take the first case first. Robert Ward, Symphony hornist, introduced John Harbison's Twilight Music as though he loved it, and the performance suggested the same. A fair number of pieces have been written for horn, violin, and piano after the example of Brahms' Op. 40 Trio (many explicitly to complement the Brahms on recital programs), but few grapple with the difficult combination of instruments anywhere near as well as John Harbison's 1984 Twilight Music. Harbison's notes to the piece remark that "the horn and the violin have little in common [. . .] they share material mainly to show how differently they project it." He's as good as his word. When motifs move from one instrument to the other, there's a pleasant shock, at the commonality as much as at the difference.

Call of the horn — or the violin?

The first of the four connected sections, for example, begins with the horn playing rising fifths — "horn calls," you think immediately. The same section ends with the violin arpeggiating over the open strings, then extending the sequence of fifths up and up, ending with artificial harmonics that vanish into the ether. Violin fifths; horn fifths. Two very different instruments, almost accidentally speaking the same language. And Harbison puts forth the idea so naturally, tenderly even, that there's no feeling of contrivance at all.

There follows a blistering scherzo, full of maniacal runs in thirds (filling in the fifths, riffing on the harmonic series). Then a slow interlude titled "Antiphon" (some truly amazing close-harmony blending here between violinist Jeremy Constant — playing almost senza vibrato at times — and Ward) and then a loose, lyrical closing section. It's an arresting, fascinating, beautiful work. I can well believe Ward's tale, in his introduction to Sunday's performance, that he first heard it while driving and had to pull over to listen until the piece was done. The performance was both impeccable and loving (Marc Shapiro was the nimble pianist).

I wish I had liked the following Mozart Piano Quartet (the E-flat one, K. 493) as much. It also was beautifully played, rather too beautifully in fact — a little less richness and control and a little more variety and whimsy would have done it good. Not that the richness and control weren't things to marvel at. The strings were the Symphony's new concertmaster, Alexander Barantschik; the principal violist, Gerladine Walther; and the principal cellist, Michael Grebanier — a San Francisco Dream Team, if you will — and the pianist was the formidable Roy Bogas.

Glorious strings

The three strings really are a glorious lot, separately or together, and they blend uncommonly well. Anything Walther puts her hand to turns to gold, of course (mind you, there speaks one of the unofficial Geraldine Walther Fan Club — I kept mentally scanning ahead in the score to anticipate the next viola solo), but her tone matches Barantschik's uncannily, too; and Grebanier, with a slightly wirier sound, nonetheless seemed to fit right in.

Bogas was not, I think, at his immaculate best; the playing was not as articulate as is his wont, and some of the passagework was uneven. But what bothered me more was the cultivated, sleek air of this performance, every phrase beautifully spun out, every line mellifluously uninterrupted from beginning to end. It's almost as though the players had taken to heart the old line about playing "as though you are a singer" (the best possible advice), but then studied only vocalises. Vocal lines have consonants in them, and, more to the point, texts. I don't mean to suggest that the Symphony quartet played everything legato (they didn't, of course; in fact, all the spiccato in the finale was aggressively vertical in a way I didn't quite understand). But the singer's idea of putting a spin, a twist, a sly inflection on a syllable (or a note) — that wasn't there. It was all so good. And yet.

And then Stravinsky's L' Histoire du soldat. This was rather confusingly billed as the Suite in the program (complete with movement titles — anyone actually trying to follow the performance using that page would have gotten hopelessly lost in the first ten minutes). In fact what we heard was pretty near the whole thing, with all the music (as far as I could tell, anyway) and a narration more rewritten than abridged.

Sassy narration

The well-known monologist Josh Kornbluth was the narrator, taking the parts of the Soldier and the Devil as well as the narration. The updated/abridged/tweaked text is presumably his, though no credit was given anywhere. The additions are minor and mostly more amusing than annoying (e.g., when the Soldier comes home the first time, in the most recent English version [Flanders/Black], he finds his fiancée "Married! With two children!"; here it's "Married, With Children, like the show"). The deletions are also minor and affect the drama more than the music; the big one is the card game where, in the original, the Soldier gets rid of all the money earned through the Devil's book.

Kornbluth changed voices fluently and got through the rhythmicized text in musical sections very well, and some of his comic touches were perfect. (He sang out "Down a hot and dusty road/Tramps a man without his load" in the tones of a drill sergeant. I've never heard anyone do it before, but the tempo and the meter and the very cadence of the words are right.)

As for the players . . . well, it was a brilliant performance all round, certainly the best I've ever heard live. Sarn Oliver, in the violin chair, obviously had the most work to do, and he did it magnificently, with incisive bowing and great flair. (Okay, he blew off Stravinsky's annoying bowings in several of the numbers, but who doesn't?) He can tango with the best of them, and the "Ragtime" was terrific too, though I can imagine a more kittenish "Waltz."

The others all deserve to be named, too: Stephen Tramontozzi, bass; David Neuman, clarinet; Rob Weir, bassoon; Mark Inouye, trumpet; Don Benham, trombone; Raymond Froelich, percussion. Florin Parvulescu, who is a Symphony violinist, conducted. It was a magnificent group performance — tight, blended, disciplined, uncompromising. I don't know when I've heard people having so much fun and working so hard at the same time.

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)