For the past year-plus, the New Century Chamber Orchestra has been auditioning prospective artistic directors to replace the departed Krista Bennion Feeney, the orchestra's leader from 1999 through 2006. The search is nearing its end — the winner is to be announced at the orchestra's "Evening Serenade" benefit performance Nov. 29 — and the orchestra's admirers are watching with some anticipation to see what direction the ensemble will take. The NCCO is a characterful band but also, it seems to me, a rather malleable one, capable of taking on strikingly different personalities according to need and inclination.
If the NCCO's players have anything obviously in common besides extraordinary technical command, it's that all of them are associated professionally with a number of orchestras and smaller ensembles. Adaptivity in these circumstances is a basic survival skill. Left entirely to their own devices, the instrumentalists stand some risk of falling back too easily on technical polish alone. What the NCCO becomes next depends greatly on who takes the helm.
One of Feeney's strengths was her plain physical energy — not so much the volume of her sound as the intensity of character borne by it. (I remember her inaugural concert as NCCO director in 1999: a tremendous, seething Schoenberg
Verklärte Nacht, and a John Adams
Shaker Loops in which she seemed to be powering the orchestra singlehandedly.) At her best she baldly goaded the orchestra into surpassing itself.
So, in her notoriously distinctive style, did Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the New Century's guest-leader Sunday afternoon at San Rafael's Osher Marin Jewish Community Center. Whether the NCCO actually
wants incitement on a Salerno-Sonnenbergian level as a permanent proposition, we will soon find out. It would likely be exasperating; it would almost certainly be exhausting; but it could not possibly be dull.
A Habit of Intensity
Salerno-Sonnenberg throws herself into music with abandon. Her boundless gusto is more than a little alarming once you realize that the intensity isn't a reaction to this or that piece, but her default setting. She revels in emphases, broad inflections, and vivid dashes of character, to the extent that the line she's manipulating tends to disappear. And from a violinistic standpoint, all that shaping can send her out of technical control much too easily.
In Bach's A-minor Violin Concerto (BWV 1041), pitches were swallowed, lines bulged suddenly or evaporated just as abruptly into whispers, and a fine singing legato devolved repeatedly into a dragging
portato emphasis on each succesive pitch that was so heavy she might as well have been using separate bows. Most irritatingly, when she played full-out her ordinarily wide vibrato became even more so, tending to the sharp side of the note and producing a sound I can only call borderline grotesque.
For all that, it was a strangely exhilarating performance. It's not just that Salerno-Sonnenberg's enjoyment is infectious, though that's part of the magic, surely. (The NCCO players caught it; never before have I heard them play Baroque music with anything like Sunday's level of wit and energy.) It's that even the wildest of her extravagances in the Bach had a musical point.
It might have been fantastically wrought Bach, but there was design and wit and sly intelligence in its arabesques. Not like any Bach I had heard before, either — except, it came to me with a shock midway through, from the more outré of today's "period" fiddlers. If you want a point of reference for Salerno-Sonnenberg, don't think of other "modern" violinists. Think Andrew Manze — or, even better, Fabio Biondi, who besides the gestural commonalities affects a hyperactive vibrato somewhat like Salerno-Sonnenberg's own. She's both that invigorating and that infuriatingly weird.
I had high hopes for Fritz Kreisler's
Praeludium and Allegro, which is the sort of virtuoso monologue Salerno-Sonnenberg might be expected to revel in. But I was disappointed, because the Clarice Assad string-orchestra version that opened Sunday's concert was not, as I had expected, an orchestration of the piano accompaniment to back the violin solo, but instead a thoroughgoing string-orchestra transcription that spread the melodic and figurational goodies around the entire band.
The NCCO clearly enjoyed itself, but the transcription leached a good deal of the fun out of the music. It softened the piece's virtuosic edges (what a shame to see the violins blithely crossing strings in one well-known passage where Kreisler makes the violinist inch way up the G string) and blurred its rhetoric. The solo violin part, such as it was, included a couple of the original's highlights but also some irritatingly irrelevant countermelodies that, if they derived from Kreisler's composition at all, must have been well-buried in the piano part. Too much cleverness, not enough straightforward bravado.
Fearless Helmsmanship
Whatever the liabilities of Salerno-Sonnenberg's solo violin-playing, in the purely orchestral parts of the program she proved a magnificent leader. Mendelssohn's taut little one-movement String Symphony No. 10 — surely one of the more jaw-dropping things ever written by a 14-year-old — was impulsive and bursting with energy, but also nuanced and finely controlled, with a delightful crispness and unanimity of articulation. Salerno-Sonnenberg encouraged gutsy playing, though not to the point of exagerration. The divided violas, for example (with Kurt Rohde joining the regular three players just for this work), dug in splendidly.
Tchaikovsky's
String Serenade, for its part, got a stirring and nobly shaped performance that was among the better things I've heard this orchestra do. It's difficult to bring the work off with so small an ensemble, but on Sunday the NCCO sounded neither undermanned nor strident, just confidently right-sized. And Salerno-Sonnenberg parsed and phrased with keen imagination everywhere, sometimes molding the music into unexpected shapes, but always conveying thought and care. As in the Mendelssohn, the off-the-string articulation was marvelous along the entire dynamic scale, while the string sound at climactic moments had a genuine thrill in it.
To be sure, a good bit of that last thrill was just Salerno-Sonnenberg's own defiantly unintegrated sound obtruding from the section's. At times she runs so exuberantly at the head of the pack that she forgets momentarily that she's ostensibly not only leading it but
in it. You could hear the same thing happening occasionally in terms of articulation, both here and in the Bach: Her own bowstrokes were sometimes annoyingly longer than those of the players she'd schooled. (In the Bach, this was particularly egregious in the slow movement, where Salerno-Sonnenberg played along in most of the tuttis. She conveyed the sense of horizontal flow she wanted with the bow almost as though it were a baton, but seemingly forgot that her bowing, unlike conducting, was producing sound.) And while she egged the NCCO into some satisfyingly juicy portamentos, sometimes she turned out awkwardly to be the only player doing a particular one.
So, is this the sort of partnership that might work out in the long run? I have no idea, but if the NCCO should jump this way, no one will be keener to see how it turns out than I. The possibilities are too fascinating. Salerno-Sonnenberg's encore was Jascha Heifetz' arrangement of "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" from Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess, played with a degree of sensual abandon that would have elevated Heifetz' perpetually raised eyebrows another inch or so, and accompanied by the band with a species of sultry grace I've not heard from it before. The risks are obvious, but all the same ... this could be fun.