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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Ma, Frank and Kahane, Very Special in Santa Rosa
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By Robert Commanday
At last a symphony gala that's not glitter, glitz and celebrities but the real article, moreover, during the musical dead weeks of the waning summer. The Santa Rosa Symphony further had the good sense to dodge the marketing cliche and not call it a gala. What it produced last Friday at Jeff Kahane's Luther Burbank Center for the Arts was a symphony special, very special. "An Evening With Pamela Frank, Yo-Yo Ma and Jeffrey Kahane," as the program was simply billed, combined the talents of the cellist, the violinist and the pianist and orchestra's conductor to re-engage and rediscover three cherished works.
The gentle lyrical siciliana of Dvorak's Romance in F Minor against softly diffused, almost misty background is seductive invitation to a much warmer, more active affair. The violinist Pamela Frank led it on as if to arouse the emotion behind a nostalgic memory. With rich, generous tone, her playing reached into the mounting phrases, insinuatingly, then penetratingly. Frank plays out to the audience, as if physically seeking to confirm the connection, a manner that seems to reflect her professional association with Isaac Stern. While overt, this does not come off as externalizing but rather like a singer's urging the expression to listeners. Frank's Dvorak Romance was as beautiful as the piece can be.
The support of the Santa Rosa Symphony, about half its normal complement for this single, pre-season performance, was sensitive to the point of capturing the ephemeral, wispy charm. Kahane was responsible for drawing that close feeling of course. The players, many of them, are shared by other orchestras, but under him they achieve his refinement and become his admirable ensemble.
Again, this time with the dearly affective Elgar Cello Concerto, Yo-Yo Ma exceeded the high expectations that motivated the journey to Santa Rosa. Playing (typically) as if it were the most important performance of his life, he turned the work from its fondly remembered, easily described qualities of reverie, bittersweet, and sentimental mood into an intense and moving experience. His dreaming with the reverie, lovely and suspended, served to set up his digging into the succeeding music.. There the passion became more vital as he charged into and accelerated into the end of the musical period, bringing a sense of near-despair for an original boldness in this interpretation. The relief of the skittering Scherzo prepared the songful and meditative Adagio which was in turn answered by Ma's resoluteness and dashing gestures in the final allegro.
In this way, by connecting the contrasting elements in the work so that one takes its consequence from another, finding meaning in the contrast, Ma established a unity and big-lined sense of the Elgar special to this performance. For all that's been said in admiration of his playing, more can be found. The sheer sound is possessive as ever, making the listener into a sympathetic chamber of the resonance. It's not any one signature tone or sonority but a language of color and nuance. It is playing that conveys the spirit of singing and singing of the spirit. Ma's bond to the instrument is so secure, he uses it with a creativity that extends his interpretive freedom to the limits of his fantasy. Just one example is the way he dares, in an inspired moment, thrust the body of the cello to the left, away from him, a gesture that extends or colors the effect of his bowing at that instant.
For his part, Kahane, fully tuned to Ma's intuitions and intentions from their long time partnership in cello-piano recitals, conducted the Elgar keenly, so that the orchestra too was bonded to the cellist and his vision of the work.
After intermission, with the orchestra members relieved of further duty and many of them sitting onstage as audience, the three close musical associates, Kahane, Frank and Ma, inc., joined in a fresh performance of Beethoven's Piano Trio in B flat, Op. 97, "Archduke." This time Kahane, the pianist, was the leader or primus inter pares, as he initiated the work in the Beethovenian way, "don't be too sure where this piece is going." Elegance and spaciousness, and a certain serenity to start, the first movement gathered its grand lyrical material and in developing it, became a searching, fulfilling realization. Again, the Scherzo starting out in its lighthearted manner, almost jocular in the playing, turned into its insinuating, shadowy contrapuntal dialog, then back of course, and forth, in exquisite interplay. The Andante cantabile variations pursued its extended play on the personality possibilities, the most satisfying of a happy performance.
The reason is that these three played marvellously with and to each other, Kahane was pianism translucent, light, precise and he gave an absolutely clear, true rhythmic frame throughout. The musicality of Frank and of Ma were a perfect match. The three of them might have passed as a trio that had spent a career touring together, except for the freshness, immediacy and evident joy that made this "Archduke" grand and, very special.
One extra fillip to the program -- the trio was joined by the concertmaster, Joseph Edelberg, and principal violist, Linda Ghidossi Deluca, for a happy run at the final movement of Dvorak's Piano Quintet. It was a musical evening to be remembered. Of how many summer concerts can that be said?
(Robert Commanday, SFCV's Editor, is the former music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.)
©1998 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved
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