The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra closed its 2010-2011 season with a concert at Zellerbach Hall on Thursday that both segregated and showcased the ensemble’s considerable musical assets.
The woodwinds and brasses got to speak and speak alone first, in Stravinsky’s beguiling Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Then the strings took over, in a warm and shapely account of Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110, a transcription of his String Quartet No. 8. Finally the human voice, eloquently represented by the UC Chamber Chorus and Alumni, came to the fore, in James MacMillan’s widely performed and frankly melodramatic Seven Last Words from the Cross. That 1994 piece, scored for chorus and strings, occupied the second half of this gratifying program. Music director Joana Carneiro conducted.
Compact as it is, Stravinsky’s 1921 work earns the plural "Symphonies" in its title. Instead of adopting conventional symphonic form, the piece, neoclassical in style rather than structure, casts its favor on different groups of instruments, sonorities, and effects with pleasing and playful variety. Despite some tentative playing here and there, the performance captured the composer’s range of capering dry wit, meditative musing, expressive dialogue, and harmonious calm.
An early riff from the flutes and clarinets had a wandering insouciance that brought Petrushka to mind. The French horns, seated off by themselves stage right, fused elegantly. Burbling conversations broke out among assorted instruments, some of them speaking sharply at times and others trying to calm the fray. A muted chorale brought the piece to a serene close.
That final prayerful mood was apt. According to subsequent musicological research, Stravinksy apparently based this multipaneled work on a Russian Orthodox worship service for the dead. As such, even if listeners needed the program notes to realize it, the piece served as a kind of sacred foreshadowing of MacMillan’s Last Words.
With its assorted quotations from his own works, a musical anagram of his name and a brawny soulfulness, Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 of 1960 is an ardently personal work. The Berkeley strings gave Rudolf Barshai’s transcription just the sort of impassioned performance this Chamber Symphony calls for. A broad deep sound filled the hall in the opening Largo. The Allegro had an antic drive, with lightning bolts of sharp, decisive chords. Concertmaster Franklyn D’Antonio’s restrained vibrato lent an elegiac solemnity to his solos. The phrasing throughout was choice.
Drawing out a hushed but subliminally charged string pianissmo at the outset, Carneiro prepared the way for the eventful Seven Last Words to come. What began as a misty interplay of voices and strings soon erupted into wrenching outbursts, angular harmonies and fierce ecstasies. All that came in the first section. MacMillans’ arresting but sometimes overwrought piece holds nothing in reserve. The chorus cried out in a capella phases set off by prolonged silences. A tidal wave of grief rose from basses to cellos to violas and violins. Demonically clacking pizzicatos, gleaming chords, tender vocal duets, and more crowded this sprawling sacred canvas. Both chorus and orchestra tracked the landscape faithfully.
Gripping and achingly heartsick as much of it was, a sense of musical and spiritual exhaustion began to surface. By the fifth word (‘I thirst"), it began to seem that intensity could only be sustained so long. MacMillan’s theological showmanship went over the top at times, leaving both performers and the audience spent. A sensed of shared conviction ebbed. The final, scrabbling phrases had to compete with restless coughing.
For a listener just catching up with Carneiro at the end of her second season as music director, the dynamic connection between conductor and musicians was apparent. Working without a baton, she made her intentions palpable, setting tempos, signaling entrances, and forming phrases with a sculptural precision and urgency. The only deficit of the evening’s program was not hearing the Berkeley Symphony in full force, with strings, woodwinds, brasses, and the absent percussion section all pulling together.
A fourth piece scheduled for the evening, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Vendaval (Storm), commissioned as tribute to former Berkeley Symphony board and advisory council member Harry Dov Weininger (1933-2010), was postponed. The composer, who was slated to perform the solo piano work, was attending to a family medical emergency. Unfortunate as that program omission was, it’s doubtful that anyone went away feeling shortchanged by this engrossing concert.