New Carmel Bach Festival Music Director Paul Goodwin made a refreshing, even startling, impression as he conducted Friday night’s program of the “pastoral” symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Beethoven at Sunset Center. Here was a different facet to the one implied by Goodwin’s reputation as a Baroque specialist, but one showing him to be just as engaged, energized, and imaginative in this repertory.
In the Beethoven, which occupied the second half of the concert, Goodwin’s tempos were taut and his phrasing elastic, giving the whole a lithe freshness. The slow movement, “Scene by the Brook,” never bogged down, as it easily can when conducted with less insight into its musico-pictorial imagery. With dynamic contrasts, Goodwin cast the reading into welcome 3-D, while his pacing and spot-on timing created anticipation, suspense, and release in ideal proportions.
The orchestra, using “modern” instruments, sounded rich and confident. When called for, the second violin and viola sections stood forward of their peers. Trumpet and horn solos were bold and clear; likewise the warm-toned wind solos, with the oboe and clarinet chirping like the birds they are often supposed to be. The thunderstorm seemed to rise and subside with a better sense of context than any I have heard in a long while — big but not huge, stormy yet with all its musicality intact. As Goodwin moved from one side of the podium to the other, his focused, hands-on attention to detail kept the textures transparent and illuminated from within.
Goodwin’s hands-on attention to detail kept the textures transparent and illuminated from within.
Vaughn Williams’ largely wistful Third Symphony, also titled “Pastoral,” exhibits a much different nostalgia, one for friends lost in World War I. Steeped in English folksong, the score is packed with cameo solos, the better to individualize and personalize its underlying sense of sorrow. (In the second movement, trumpet and horn solos, without valves, impose the natural scale against the equal-tempered tuning of the orchestra, calling to mind the sound of a military bugle.) Still, the symphony wraps its orchestral arms around the suffering, suffusing it with healing comfort, made the more haunting with modal harmonies and scales.
Surprising Modern Interlude
This quality is most distinctive in the works of Vaughan Williams, as is more familiar in The Lark Ascending, which comes from the same period. It took, therefore, a deft hand for Goodwin to insert a work by contemporary composer Mark Anthony Turnage between the third and fourth movements, not least for the opulent if unexpected sound of tenor saxophone, played here with unselfconscious flair by jazzman Joe Lovano.
Indeed, Turnage’s 2004 work was inspired by Vaughan Williams’ The Lark, incorporates phrases from it, and makes complementary use of the orchestra, with reduced forces. Called A Man Descending, and adding about 15 minutes to the whole, it is a far cry from Turnage’s many heaven-storming enfant terrible orchestral scores. Lovano’s room-filling solo included three cadenzas, one accompanied, and came to its conclusion recalling The Lark one final time before flowing seamlessly into the symphony’s final movement.
The mood of the symphony, including the Turnage, was broken only by the third movement, a “kind of Tudor” dance, as Goodwin characterized it, both jazzy and fugal. (This was only the second time a Vaughan Williams symphony has been played in Monterey County; decades ago the Utah Symphony Orchestra, under Maurice Abravanel, played the Fifth at Hartnell College in Salinas.) At last, the finale builds to a drawn-out climax that finally subsides away to nothingness.