The New Century Chamber Orchestra's next season will see the orchestra with a regular music director again, in the person of the newly hired Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Still, the ensemble's two-year run of guest-directed concerts, a running adventure that has resulted in far more hits than misses, is ending on a high note.
The Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton Pine, director for the NCCO's current, season-ending set, is a player of rare refinement and rarer inquisitiveness. In Sunday's performance at San Rafael's Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, repertoire and playing alike bore her distinctive stamp. (The program repeats June 10 at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre.)
Pine, a dedicated cultural ambassador who runs her own foundation, doesn't exactly shun the standard repertoire, but over the past 15 years she has made a repeated point of poking around outside it — taking up both Baroque violin and fiddle, championing Joseph Joachim's neglected Violin Concerto, and the like. Her most recent project — delving into the repertoire of the late-19th-century American virtuoso Maud Powell — is characteristic of her nose for interesting byways.
The NCCO program drew on another of her interests: the music of composers of African descent. In 1999 Pine recorded a disc of violin concertos by black composers for her usual recording label, the Chicago-based
Cedille, including the work of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, which opened Sunday's concert. (As part of its African Heritage Symphony Series, Cedille has also recorded the other two works on the first half of this program.)
The composer known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges bears a life story so irresistibly romantic that you might be forgiven for thinking it fictional. The son of a French plantation-owner on Guadeloupe and his (enslaved) mistress, Saint-Georges was brought up as though he were a legitimate son and trained in a gentleman's pursuits. Following his father back to France, Saint-Georges shortly became one of Europe's most celebrated swordsmen, as well as a violinist of great renown.
Composer a Formidable Violinist, to Boot
To judge by his violin concertos and symphonies concertantes, which in recent years have been finding their way finally onto recordings, Saint-Georges was a formidable violinist, as well as a more than ordinarily cogent and disciplined composer. In terms of the cut of the themes and the general design, the concerto on Sunday's program (the A-Major Op. 5/2) is closer to Mozart's concertos than to anything else in the current mainstream violin repertory. Yet the technical demands are greater.
As Pine pointed out before the performance, Saint-Georges sends the violinist a fifth higher up the fingerboard than Mozart does in any of his five concertos. But to a violinist the passagework presents more startling difficulties than the high notes. There are some real doozies in both outer movements. The complicated bariolage and the wicked run of broken tenths in the first movement, the flashy sextuplets laced with awkward string-crossings in the last — these are all the more impressive for being dropped stealthily into the midst of a solo part whose dominant character is suave songfulness.
Pine herself heightened this effect by sailing through the difficulties with the merest raised eyebrow to mark their onset. Her playing was scrupulously neat, disciplined, instinctively elegant; there was no waste of bow or effort or, indeed, anything else. The concerto soloist as swashbuckling hero this was not, despite the temptations offered by Saint-Georges' biography. Instead it was cultured, understated, devastatingly accomplished, and (with Pine's narrow, fast vibrato) ineluctably French-sounding — rather like the historical Saint-Georges, I imagine.
As is its wont, the NCCO matched Pine's manner and sound perfectly, playing with great refinement and, if anything, an excess of tact. It would have been nice if Pine had separated the violin sections antiphonally; as it was, the seconds were somewhat buried behind the firsts. And in the Rondeau finale, in which Pine's aversion to open strings in the theme would have mystified the composer, the NCCO players followed suit, with the result that the music had little of the bright, open character that the key of A major usually does in string music. All the same, this was lovely playing, detailed and sharply responsive to Pine's direction.
A Newly Discovered Composer
The remaining two pieces on the first half were new to me and, I imagine, to nearly everyone else present. George Walker was born in 1922 and is still with us (and composing, at that — the
worklist at MMB Music's Web site contains entries from as recently as last year). He won a Pulitzer in 1996 for his
Lilacs for soprano and orchestra.
Walker's
Lyric for Strings is a very early work, written in 1941 for string quartet and originally titled
Lament (the eventual title was substituted at his publisher's suggestion). In its string orchestra guise it has evidently become Walker's most-performed composition.
Whether that's just or not it would be impossible to say without hearing more of his music, though the piece is lovely. A brief idyll, emotionally reserved but not cold, it has something of Barber's melodic cast. Once or twice, a turn of phrase recalled to me the Mahler of the “Adagietto.” The NCCO's gentle performance was beautifully judged, transparent but warm.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Sinfonietta No. 2, subtitled “Generations,” is a different sort of beast. In naming their son after the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson's parents might have been stacking the deck as to the child's ultimate career. Certainly Perkinson (1932-2004) repaid the favor handsomely in this 1996 work, its movements each dedicated to a member of his family.
Perkinson's music is often syncopated, but faux-jazz it is not. I was reminded less of the Afro-American musical tradition than of the likes of Bloch, Bartók, and Milhaud. The first two come to mind in the vigorous contrapuntal writing for strings; the last, in Perkinson's taste for thick, chordal textures moving primarily in parallel. That, indeed, seems like something of a compositional tic, at least in this work.
Cheeky Glissandi
The opening “Mysterioso” introduces the parallel-chords business early on, with the lines moving in fifths at first and later in denser harmonizations. The second movement “Alla Sarabanda” begins and ends with some gorgeous writing for the violas (richly played by NCCO's three). The following “Alla Burletta,” mainly pizzicato but decorated with cheeky bowed glissandi in the lower strings (and some great slap bass from Karl Doty), is a hoot.
The finale (“Allegro Vivace”) follows straight on from the third movement, in a blistering fugato opened by the violas. Later, the violins and violas layer on more of those dense parallel waves of sound over a wild, unruly cello/bass groove. The movement, which weaves in material from the other three, makes an exhilarating conclusion to a singularly attractive piece.
NCCO's performance was polished in sound and tight in ensemble, though it didn't seem to me entirely comfortable. The ensemble's way with the syncopations was a touch stilted: Everything was in the right place, but without the zing in the bowstroke (and the left hand) that bespeaks full confidence with the rhythm. Partly, I suspect, this was again an instance of the orchestra's following Pine's lead. She is miserly with her bow, and uses vibrato by way of accent much less than is usual. A little more rhythmic swagger would not have been out of place.
After such a colorful and novel first half for the entire ensemble, the one-on-a-part Brahms sextet (in B-flat major, Op. 18) following intermission would have needed a once-in-a-lifetime performance to compete. In the event, it was merely (expectedly) well-played, and consequently a bit of a letdown. Pine, joined by NCCOers Deborah Tien Price (violin), Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca and Cassandra Lynne Richburg (viola), and Joanne Lin and Robin Bonnell (cellos), dominated temperamentally as well as dynamically.
The B-flat Sextet is effusive, generous early Brahms, full of good tunes and the sort of momentary, soaring solo moments for the inner parts that amateur string players live for. The NCCO players, to be frank, could have used more of the chamber-music-reading-party vibe. Even Ghidossi-DeLuca, the NCCO's heady-toned principal violist, sounded unusually reserved, while Lin on the meaty first cello line was positively demure at times. (Bonnell, by contrast, seemed alone to be getting into the spirit of the thing, somewhat to the detriment of his bow hair.) Despite some exquisite quiet playing in the
maggiore part of the slow movement and a madcap final accelerando in the finale, the performance never really took off.