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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Jaunt Through Time
August 17, 2002 |
By Mark Wardlaw
Creative programming, stellar solo performances, engaging communication with the audience, and seasoned ensemble playing were the recipe for success at Saturday's Music In The Vineyards performance. Time Travel: A Four-Century Trip was presented to an enthusiastic audience at Clos Pegase Winery in the barrel-lined, richly aromatic Cave Theater.
The four centuries were represented in the music of Georg Telemann, his little-known Belgian/Italian baroque counterpart Joseph-Hector Fiocco, Antonin Dvorak, the 20th-century English composer Gerald Finzi, and a premier performance of a work commissioned for MITV by Minnesota composer David Evan Thomas. It is not surprising that a concert encompassing music from more than a 250-year time span would require an unusual assemblage of musicians. The line-up of nine strings, oboe, harpsichord, recorder, and soprano was a delicious novelty. Festival directors Michael and Daria Adams employed these forces in a presentation of interesting, pleasant, and colorful music that culminated in the lone great piece of the program — Dvorak's String Quartet op. 96 (the "American").
This sunny, ebullient work stood alone on the second half of the concert. It was composed in 1893 while the Czech composer and his family lived in the Bohemian community of Spillville, Iowa. Several other important works, including the "New World" Symphony and the String Quintet, also were composed during this time. Dvorak's prodigious melodic gifts and facility in composition bring Mozart to mind. This quartet makes a strong case for the comparison. The melodies, each rich and distinct, come in rapid-fire succession with effervescent ease. Dvorak, like Mozart, often dispensed with conventional melodic development, rather introducing a new melody in its place; and, again as in Mozart's works, many of the melodies appear only once.
This is rhythmically straightforward Dvorak, noticeably free of his trademark use of hemiola (a type of rhythmic displacement), except in the lively and compelling third movement. The playing here was magnificent. Violinists Dawn Harms and Frank Almond, violist Michael Adams, and cellist Beth Rapier were consistent in phrasing, nuance, intonation, and balance. The cello solo at the end of the second movement was particularly noteworthy for Rapier's breadth of line and exquisite sound. The audience responded with a rousing and lengthy standing ovation that I believe was as much for Dvorak as for the performers. The concert began poignantly with a premier of a new work dedicated to the memory of Gail Adams, the founding Executive Director of MITV who succumbed to cancer last May. Composer David Evan Thomas was on hand to provide helpful insights into his new work. To Live In This World is accessible, lyrical music that features Mary Oliver's poetry set for soprano and string quartet. Karen Clift negotiated difficult vocal intervals and modulations with assurance and clarity. She possesses a full, focused instrument with impressive range and accuracy of pitch. Her delivery never seemed forced, and her restraint and control in the upper register were admirable. The instrumental score is a tour de force of string techniques that the players handled expertly. Clift's lower register occasionally was overbalanced by the strings, though they generally accompanied with great sensitivity. I believe this problem was attributable to Clift standing behind the strings, a position that no doubt facilitated better communication among performers. Clift also shone in Finzi's pretty but unremarkable Dies Natalis. In this piece she was stationed in front of nine strings and there were no balance problems. Composer David Thomas capably conducted the ensemble. Finzi chose texts by Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) for his music, which is typically contrapuntal, lush in sonority, and full of long, meandering phrases that somehow find their way home to lovely resolutions. Unfortunately, the work never really reaches a discernable crest. And it was a little too long for its position at the end of a lengthy first half.
The concert's other highlight was Telemann's Concerto for Recorder, Oboe, Violin, and Continuo. Brazilian recorder soloist Clea Galhano was stunningly facile in the work's final movement, and this balanced her intonation problems in the piece's earlier sections in which she tended to play flat to the other soloists, oboist Kathy Greenbank and Daria Adams, baroque violin. I was impressed with Greenbank's beautiful, dark sound and with Adams' stylistic and rhythmic verve. Harpsichordist Vivian Montgomery and baroque 'cellist Claire Garabedian provided stalwart accompaniment, particularly with respect to their nearly perfect rhythmic execution. All five performers crafted a meticulous primer, if you will, that clearly led the audience through the dense layers of contrapuntal and imitative writing that define the baroque instrumental style. Festival director Michael Adams was affable and at times witty in his remarks to the audience. I approve of this important connection between audience and performers so long as the tone is conversational, free from pedantry, and sufficiently brief. Adams hosts the Minnesota Orchestra's "Adventures in Music" family concert series and has done radio work, so his deft handling of this role was no surprise. (Mark Wardlaw is a clarinetist in the Santa Rosa Symphony. He performs frequently in solo recitals and in chamber ensembles. In addition, he is a saxophonist and the director of instrumental music at Santa Rosa High School.) ©2002 Mark Wardlaw, all rights reserved |