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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Mack McCray Rhoslyn Jones
January 27, 2007
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Schubertiad in Sonoma By D. Kern Holoman
Saturday’s Schubertiad, sponsored by the Santa Rosa Symphony, was the first of a series of four concerts with the provocative and provoking title "Early Romantics Festival/Loss and Transcendence." It was a pleasing way to spend a curious time slot, suspended there in the 1820s and in almost the right scenery, comfortably isolated in a school auditorium from the most ghastly stretch of highway in Northern California.
And very chichi it was, from the dramatic approach to the lovely Sonoma Country Day School, through 90 minutes of artful readings from the canon of familiar masterworks, and on to the après event with fine wine for all (Kendall-Jackson Merlot 2002 and Chardonnay Grand Reserve 2005). You couldn’t help noticing the same name on the theater, the sponsor acknowledgment, and the bottles: Jackson, as in the area patrons Jess Jackson and Barbara Banke. Salut.
The pianist Mack McCray, a fixture in these parts for some three decades now, was a genial master of ceremonies. In his introductory remarks, he touched on most of the central tenets of Romanticism in music — superbly, when he turned from his notes for a moment to equate melancholy, nostalgia, and loss with how he felt about his hair. (He left out Napoleon and the railroads, and I thought was chronologically suspect as to the collapse of feudalism.)
Fifteen minutes into what Gore Vidal would have called The Chat, as I was beginning to panic, the trio launched into the famous pianissimo opening of the Nocturne, D. 897, and all was well. The performance was exquisitely crafted in both shape and detail: the lovely exchange of string pizzicato accompaniment for the piano arpeggios at the start, a properly Schubertian soup at the juicier harmonic passages, the final ornament in the piano.
Soprano Rhoslyn Jones, a second-year Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, offered Die Forelle and Der Hirt auf dem Felsen in what I thought the evening’s high point. She delivered "The Trout" with exactly the spirit and gesture and intelligible German — a good thing, too, since you couldn’t read the words there in the pitch blackness — that was appropriate to the innocent vignette (from which Schubert precensored the more sinister moral). Her delivery of “The Shepherd on the Rock” revealed the many nuances Jones is finding in her voice: substantial power, firm control of the difficult passagework at the end, but also a spectrum of illustrative tone qualities that made for good storytelling. You yearned, however, for each of the lovely pianissimo floats to linger a nanosecond more — just long enough to exhale, yourself. Roy Zajac, the clarinetist, gave easily the warmest reading of his line I have ever heard. It’s possible he stole the show.
You yearned, too, for a longer set. Gretchen am Spinnrade? Heidenröslein? An die Musik?
Two of the four string players in the "Trout" Quintet, cellist Dawn Foster-Dodson and violist Wieslaw Pogorzelski, were substitutes, but of this there was no hint in their strophe in the second movement and, later, in the solo cello work in the fourth movement. That, and the understated support of Andrew McCorkle at the double bass, was so perfect as to disappear into the elegant sonority, alongside the consistent interest of violinist Lila Watanabe: in sum, what is meant by fine chamber playing. Scrappy moments were heard, as they often are in this work, but it was mercifully short on the percussive piano and vulgar bowstrokes that sometimes mar it. The performance seemed in keeping with the 19th century model it was trying to evoke, so much so that at one moment McCray and his page-turner morphed visually into a Sonoma County version of the famous engraving titled "A Liederabend at Schubert’s." The festival continues with all-Mendelssohn on Feb. 24; Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt on March 31; and on April 28 an evening with George Thomson conducting the Santa Rosa Symphony in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, with first-half commentary by the ubiquitous Professor Robert Winter of UCLA (who also is fantastique, in the proper senses of the word: bewitching, otherworldly). But what about those early Romantics? Surely these are The Romantics tout court, and a listener might regret not hearing, say, Weber and Rossini among them. The festival takes us into the 1840s; most music after that is late Romantic or post-Romantic or not Romantic at all. And what about "Loss and Transcendence," a title that needs adding to my large collection of things not to name a concert? Who gets transcended here? Not the fish.
(D. Kern Holoman is the Barbara K. Jackson Professor of Music at UC Davis, where he conducts the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra. He is completing a biography of the French conductor Charles Münch.)
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Rhoslyn Jones
