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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
Jeanne Lamon
March 4, 2007
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Around the World in Four Seasons By Jason Victor Serinus
The idea seemed as intriguing as its execution proved delightful. Canada's Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, whose 28-year history has so far produced 74 CDs and an extended season of over 50 concerts at home and abroad, cooked up the notion of visiting the seasons of different cultures. The rationale for its curious confection was to portray "a year in the life of the musical world as it was during Vivaldi's lifetime."
With Vivaldi's inescapable The Four Seasons serving as the template, Tafelmusik created a program it calls "The Four Seasons: A Cycle of the Sun." The excursion began in Italy in spring 1725 and ended, in quasi-Hollywood time travel fashion, with a new intercontinental work by film composer Mychael Danna fashioned after Vivaldi's L'inverno (Winter).
Sunday's concert, aptly scheduled for the first springlike afternoon when some attendees could arrive in short sleeves, included season-themed music from China, India, and the Inuit people of Canada's far North. In addition to Tafelmusik's orchestra of 15 players, guest performers included Wen Zhao on pipa (a four-stringed, pear-shaped instrument that surfaced in China about A.D. 400), Aruna Narayan on the sarangi (a bowed lute of north India that consists of three main playing strings made from gut, plus 36 metal "sympathetic strings"), and Aqsarniit, a two-woman ensemble of young Inuit throat singers. Flanking the musicians on either side of the stage were simple rows of candles and a few other objects relating to the seasonal rituals of Chinese, Indian, and Inuit culture.
Enhanced by the fine acoustic of Dinkelspiel Auditorium, the Stanford Lively Arts concert began with an exceedingly transparent rendition of the first movement, La primavera (Spring), of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Violinist Patricia Ahern, who ceded soloist honors to other colleagues in that work's remaining movements, may have contributed more than her fair share of squeaks, but she also produced the most silvery, engaging tone of the four violin soloists. Especially captivating were the joyful, bird-like dialogue between violins, and violist Patrick G. Jordan's captivating timbre during the second movement, Largo.
Between selections, bassist Alison MacKay cozied up to a microphone and interjected short commentary in the sort of proper, slightly stilted fashion that reminds audiences that this is, after all, "classical music." Upon informing us that the lute emerged in Venice in the Middle Ages, when Spanish and Arab musicians met in Constantinople, she noted that one of Venice's best lute makers lived just a few blocks from the site of The Four Seasons' 1725 premiere. She then handed us over to lutenist Lucas Harris, who provided a lovely rendering of Giovanni Zamboni's Fuga, from Sonate d'intavolatura di leuto (1718). Next it was Anonymous' turn, as we journeyed first to Beijing in 1725, when people followed elaborate instructions for celebrating spring, and then to India in that year's summer, where the prosperity of Venice's traders was determined by the strength of the spice harvest during monsoon season. Playing the pipa, Wen Zhao dazzled in White Snow in Spring, her unbridled, energetic strumming wooing the audience. Seated on a cushion in full lotus position, Aruna Narayan lent the sound of her more reticent sarangi to Monsoon Raga. Everyone onstage next joined in a tuneful, improvised Ciaconna clearly reminiscent of Monteverdi's madrigal "Zefiro, torna." Its highlight was a beguiling dialogue between Music Director Jeanne Lamon's violin and Narayan's sarangi. L'estate (Summer) from The Four Seasons paved the way to intermission, as soloist Julia Wedman played up an impressive storm that lacked Patricia Ahern's silvery perfume. Vivaldi's L'autunno (Autumn) featured the spicy violin of Christopher Verrette and Lucas Harris' particularly beautiful lute playing in the Adagio molto. Winter came in the form of the delightful Aqsarniit duo. Processing down the auditorium's two aisles to the stage, with one woman playing percussion, the duo offered several charming examples of throat singing. Facing each other and embracing, they competed as to who could last the longest while imitating the sounds of a river, a bird, and a "poor little dog." They ended by dividing the audience in two and staging a competition to determine which half was better at throat singing. If this was winter, the charm of Aqsarniit (literally, "northern lights") surely melted the frost. The punch line that Lamon's violin was crafted in 1725, the year that Vivaldi premiered The Four Seasons, introduced Mychael Danna's take (2003) on that composer's L'inverno (Winter). (Danna is responsible for the scores to Little Miss Sunshine, Capote, The Nativity Story, Monsoon Wedding, and a host of other films.) His all-but-the-kitchen-sink season included a throat-singing solo in the midst of paraphrases from Vivaldi; a marvelous middle movement dialogue that involved sarangi, pipa, and Lamon's violin; and assorted curiosities best relegated to the realm of background music. While it at times barely held together as music, and wouldn't have worked in any other context, Danna's pastiche served as a warm, loving musical embrace that seemed to gently echo the message of the brilliant Adams/Sellars A Flowering Tree premiere heard to the north that same weekend.
(Jason Victor Serinus writes about music for such publications as San Francisco Classical Voice, Opera News, Stereophile, San Francisco Magazine, East Bay Express, and Bay Area Reporter.)
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