The New Season Opens at Mount Wilson

l-r: Rachel Mellis, Martin Chalifour, Victor de Almeida, Todd Mason, Cécilia Tsan.

REVIEW

Cécilia Tsan and friends play Beethoven, Mason, and Mozart, Mount Wilson Observatory

DAVID J BROWN

Five years and four seasons on from its inception in 2017 (2020 was wiped out due to Covid), the summer series of Sunday afternoon chamber recitals in the great Dome of the 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory—brainchild of Trustee Dan Kohne and Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan—remains unique and absolutely maintains its sense of specialness.

The tortuous drive sets up the mood, demanding care and triggering awe as you hug the base of towering cliffs of fractured granite while trying to not more than briefly glance over at the vistas across the valley. Finally you arrive, more than a mile above the level of LA but still only a couple of dozen miles north-east of the city. Then the deal is sealed by the 20-minute climb from the car park, feeling the altitude but inhaling clean air while bathed in brilliant sunshine, with the great white Dome looming ever more prominently ahead.

And then once you’re seated inside the Dome the first impact of the music is startling in its plangent immediacy, heard at the close range dictated by the annular floor layout that wraps around the mighty telescope skeleton, protruding through from its supports on the level beneath. Yet by some miracle the extraordinarily resonant acoustic seems to have no downsides. The forte chords with which the 25-year-old Beethoven kicks off the opening Marcia of his Serenade for Violin, Viola and Cello in D major, Op. 8— the initial work in this first concert of the new season—were as cleanly transparent as they were impactful.

Beethoven’s five early string trios tend to be regarded by commentators as a minor-league warm-up for his great sequence of string quartets, and amongst them this Serenade gets even shorter shrift than its companions, Op. 3 and Opp. 9, due to its clear intent to be a relatively lightweight piece for domestic music-making. This performance, however, by Martin Chalifour (violin), Victor de Almeida (viola), and Ms. Tsan herself (cello), revealed a wealth of delights.

The young Beethoven,
by Riedel (1801).

The Marcia had plenty of strut and bounce both at the beginning and at the end (Beethoven closes the curtain on the whole piece by bringing it back after the penultimate theme-and-variations), while the Adagio that followed its initial appearance (after a full-length inter-movement pause despite the score linking Marcia and Adagio as a single entity) was played with such singing radiance that the effect was more of a vocal ensemble than an instrumental trio.

Perhaps most significant, though, was the group’s clear relishing of the young Beethoven’s humor, as when he caps the ensuing and otherwise brief and to-the-point Menuetto and Trio with an affectedly insouciant 10-measure pizzicato coda, throughout which the players beamed to its ever more etiolated conclusion. Similarly, they didn’t stint on energy for the stuttering scramble of a Scherzo section that Beethoven twice intercalates into the third movement Adagio.

Again, the affection of the group’s approach to the Allegretto alla Polacca (one of the Classical era’s few pre-Chopin polonaises) didn’t stop them making the most of the way Beethoven pretends, via a couple of whole-measure rests, to lose interest in the movement at its conclusion. Finally, in the theme-and-variations, Mr. Chalifour, Mr. de Almeida and Ms. Tsan respectively seized the individual opportunities that Beethoven builds into his first, second, and fourth variations for the violin, viola, and cello to shine.

The centerpiece of the concert was the public premiere of the Trio for Flute, Violin, and Cello composed in 2021 by Californian native Todd Mason—one of several fruits of his enviably productive Covid lockdown period alongside the String Quartet No. 3 (premiered recently in his own house concert series) and the soon-to-be-recorded Violin Concerto.

If you divide American “classical” music into a few broad and by no means mutually exclusive areas, Mason aligns with those composers (e.g. Barber, Copland, Mennin, etc.) who have maintained the European tradition of through-composed developmental music, as opposed to others (think Joplin through Gershwin and Bernstein to Jake Heggie) who have engaged more with theatrical and “popular” idioms, and—off in a different area—the experimentalists like Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Harry Partch.

Mason’s Trio, cast in his oft-used three-movement fast-slow-fast form, perfectly epitomizes his carefully wrought style, but in a performance as eloquent as that given by Rachel Mellis (flute) together with Mr. Chalifour and Ms. Tsan, there was plenty for the heart and soul as well as the mind to engage with. The outer movements—a tightly constructed Allegro Vivo based around an opening unison and downward-stepping motif for all three instruments; and a contrapuntal Presto with something of the Irish jig about it, led off by the cello—are very much the supporting frame for the central Andante.

This builds steadily from a cool interweaving of seemingly indeterminate lines—first on cello and violin and then flute and violin—which, when the cello rejoins, cohere into an increasingly vehement colloquy within which a repeated motif of a falling perfect 5th and rising perfect 4th is prominent, passing from instrument to instrument with growing emotional intensity. The cantilena reaches a pitch but then suddenly falls away, as if too much has been revealed, and the glacial drifting of the opening resumes. The Pandora’s Box of subjective feeling has, however, been opened, and the music rises to further expressive peaks, driven by the falling/rising motif, before it finally falls back to the solitary chill of the opening.

There is already a fine performance of the Trio to be enjoyed on YouTube, but this concert premiere in the Dome was a different order of experience—a little more spacious overall, perhaps in response to the exceptionally ample acoustic—in which compositional skill, ample preparation and rehearsal, and immaculate playing combined to deliver real emotional heft. This was simply one of the finest of Mason’s works that I have yet heard, and it’s to be hoped that it will be taken up by other ensembles with this particular line-up of players.

Mozart in his early 20s,
by Barbara Krafft.

What to end with, given the time constraint that the structure of these afternoon events imposes? There is a limit of one hour for the recital itself, which is repeated after a reception with refreshments, to which attendees from both shows are invited to meet the musicians. The answer was perfectly judged: to bring all four players together for the first and only time in Mozart’s Flute Quartet No. 1 in D major K.285, which he composed at the end of 1777 at the age of 21.

Unlike the Beethoven and the Mason, where all three instruments are treated as equals, Mozart’s Quartet very much highlights the flute, so that the work in effect becomes a miniature flute concerto. The opening Allegro was given extra dimension by the inclusion of its exposition repeat, making the movement occupy fully half the work’s total duration, but the highlight was undoubtedly the brief central Adagio.

Mozart confines his accompaniment for the flute’s long-breathed melody entirely to a delicate network of string pizzicati, and in the Dome’s wondrous space the sound of Ms. Mellis’s flute took on an Elysian, other-worldly quality that indelibly recalled Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Orfeo ed Euridice. A mere 34 measures, and it’s over, with the Rondo finale proceeding attaca. Mozart, at an even younger age than Beethoven when he wrote his Serenade, already knew how to leave an audience wanting more, as indeed did Ms. Tsan and her colleagues with this memorable concert. 

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 22 May 2022, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Photos: The performance: Todd Mason; Beethoven and Mozart: Wikimedia Commons.

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The Pacific Chorale Sing Vaughan Williams and Friends

Deanna Breiwick (soprano), Dashon Burton (baritone), with the Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Robert Istad, acknowledge the applause after their performance of Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, under the Ukrainian flag colors on the supertitle display.

REVIEW

Pacific Chorale, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

… but not literally “friends” of course: Frank Ticheli, the eldest amongst the three American composers and one British represented in the first half of the Pacific Chorale’s final concert in its 2021-22 season, was born in 1958, the same year that Ralph Vaughan Williams died, but nonetheless there were enough correspondences of style and sensibility between RVW’s music and theirs, as heard on the first Saturday in May, for him surely to have recognized and welcomed their 21st century upholding and continuation of the choral tradition in which he was a central 20th century figure.

l-r:Composers Jake Runestad, Frank Ticheli, and Tarik O'Regan,
and poet Marcus Omari.

The closest correspondence, perhaps surprisingly, was with the youngest composer present, Jake Runestad (b. 1986), and via a visionary creative figure from America’s literary past whose presence also infused this event. RVW was just one of many British composers who set the poetry of Walt Whitman to music, and his Dona Nobis Pacem (1936), which filled the second half of the concert and in which three of the six movements are Whitman settings drawn from various places in Leaves of Grass, was arguably his greatest work to do so.

Steel engraving of Walt Whitman in 1855,
the year of Leaves of Grass first publication.

Runestad’s Proud Music of the Storm (2017) was the final item in the first half, showing him comparably skillful in filleting the text he needed from Whitman’s much longer original poem, which first appeared in the 1871-72 edition of Leaves of Grass, though the bluff extroversion of his piece had more in common with Vaughan Williams’ earlier Whitman setting Toward the Unknown Region (1906) than the intense and visionary later work.

With the Pacific Symphony Orchestra limited here to just trumpets, trombones, percussion, harp and strings, Proud Music of the Storm’s bold and brassy opening, straightforwardly diatonic style, and clearly projected word-setting made it an obvious crowd-pleaser, with more than a touch of Hollywood feel-good and in its quiet central section one particular recurring harmonic sequence that for this listener irresistibly recalled Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme. It was clearly a choir-pleaser too, to judge by the Pacific Chorale's response, as confident and homogeneous as if it was a familiar repertoire piece for them. 

Caroline Shaw.

The greatest contrast to Runestad’s open-hearted populism had come with Music in Common Time by Caroline Shaw (b. 1986), originally written in 2014 with its accompaniment for strings only, but expanded four years later to full orchestra. This, second in order of performance, was the longest of the four first-half pieces, and must have presented far more of a challenge to Pacific Chorale Artistic Director Robert Istad and his choir, who nonetheless coped admirably with its very wide range of wordless vocalizing techniques: open-mouthed “Aaahhhs,” “Ooohhhs,” and “La-las,” closed-lips humming, shouting, vocal slides, etc.

All of this, together with orchestral writing that went from something like Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude, churning around a single note, to sudden patches of string pizzicati, to smudged up-swirls à la Beatles’ A Day in the Life, to anguished stacks of chords that refused to resolve, gave the impression of a composer searching for a way forward and throwing everything she could think of at a wall in the hope that something sticks. In its latter stages, however, Music in Common Time did achieve a sort of calm resolution, with actual words (author not credited) sung with hushed tenderness by the Chorale, that earned it warm applause.

Neither of the two shorter pieces, The Quickening (2022) by London-born Tarik O’Regan (b.1978)—a commission by the Pacific Chorale to open the concert—nor Frank Ticheli’s Until Forever Fades Away (2018), were Whitman settings, but their poetic texts, respectively by the Southern Californian poet Marcus Omari and Ticheli himself, both shared the Yankee master’s visionary spirit, alive alike to the ephemeral and the eternal, meditations on the essence of human experience interacting with the natural world.

Robert Istad.

Both covered a good deal of expressive ground in their respective six and seven minutes' duration. The Quickening traced an arc from the sound of voices (the Pacific Chorale at their most ethereal) stealing in over long-held string chords, through increasingly declamatory retreats and advances in tension, to arrive at an unexpectedly terse and unemphatic conclusion.

Until Forever Fades Away was more muscularly developmental. Somber lower strings ushered in first male, then female voices in undulating waves before arriving at a strong unison, precipitating a sudden acceleration driven by rapid chanting of “go, go, go” and slightly minimalist string chugging. But this soon retreated into a tranquil affirmation (“But wisdom sees a light draw near”), and finally to soft Holstian bitonal clashes before fading away into the empyrean.

Vaughan Williams’ cantata for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus, and very large orchestra with organ, Dona Nobis Pacem, was written in the shadow of, and as an implicit warning about, the rise of Nazism. A veteran of World War 1, he had first-hand knowledge of war horrors, but in Dona Nobis Pacem he produced a masterpiece that far transcends mere polemic, being at once a plea, a warning, a call to arms if needed, a lament, and a vision of hope and transcendence.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1936.

Ever the master selector and setter of words, RVW fashioned the work not only from Whitman but also Catholic liturgy, many different Biblical passages, and the words of the 19th century English Quaker politician John Bright (from an 1855 Parliamentary speech about the war against the Russians in Crimea!), achieving a synthesis of consummate economy and impact—not a note too many, and none wasted.

Aside from a passing regret that the Pacific Symphony strings were reduced by a few desks from their full strength, Robert Istad and his forces rose to the considerable challenge of presenting Dona Nobis Pacem with its full expressive range intact, from the anguished appeal by the soprano in the opening Agnus Dei (Deanna Breiwick’s voice having just about the ideal combination of strength and clarity, with a touch of more vulnerable “pure” tone) to her quiet reappearance, the plea for peace unchanged, at the conclusion of the radiantly optimistic sixth movement, O Man, Greatly Beloved, some 35 minutes later.

Dashon Burton.

Deanna Breiwick.

In between came the martial savagery of movement II Beat! beat! drums!, its stentorian choral challenges and orchestral maelstrom capped off by organist Jung-A Lee on the Segerstrom Hall’s magnificent William J. Gillespie Concert Organ; and the grief-laden and heartfelt Reconciliation, movement III, led by the rich tones of baritone Dashon Burton (truly “beautiful as the sky”).

Then at the heart of the work, came RVW’s magnificently processional setting of Whitman’s Dirge for Two Veterans, given its full weight, at once lamenting and celebratory, by the Pacific Chorale and Symphony Orchestra under Dr. Istad's authoritative baton. Remarkably, Dirge for Two Veterans was originally written in 1914 and incorporated into Dona Nobis Pacem 22 years later, yet without the slightest sense of stylistic incongruity.

John Bright’s words at the start of movement V “The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land”—and indeed the whole work—had, of course, a contemporary relevance that Dr. Istad could not have foreseen when he planned the performance, the first-ever of Dona Nobis Pacem by the Pacific Chorale, before the onset of the Covid pandemic. As it was, the appearance of the colors of the Ukrainian flag across the supertitle screen at the conclusion of this refined but urgent account of Vaughan Williams’ great work was a final underlining of that relevance. “Give us peace”, indeed. 

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 Pacific Chorale, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, 5:00pm, Saturday, May 7, 2021.

Images: The performance: Doug Gifford for Pacific Chorale; Walt Whitman, Caroline Shaw, and Ralph Vaughan Williams: Wikimedia Commons.

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At Mason House, Chamber Music Reads the Room

l-r: Steven Vanhauwaert, Alma Fernandez, Cécilia Tsan, Ambroise Aubrun.

REVIEW

Piano Quartet Masterpieces, Mason House, Mar Vista

John Stodder

For all but the most fortunate fans, most music we hear comes through a home stereo, car speakers or earbuds. No matter where it was recorded, we wrest it from that environment to ours. We might listen to the grandeur of Beethoven’s Ninth alone in bed, or an unaccompanied Bach violin sonata while staring through a windshield on the 405. It is easy to forget that before music became so portable, it was usually written for, and presented in, specific environments.

When we say “chamber music,” mostly we think of small ensembles, but the term describes the places where it was performed: not a “church, theater or public concert room,” according to the music historian Charles Burney, but instead a “palace chamber,” or in more egalitarian times, a private home.

A chamber is where over 50 classical music fans found ourselves on Saturday, April 9. Mason House, a small private home in Mar Vista, was remodeled a few years ago with the living and dining room combined into a performance space. Its most recent concert featured violinist Ambroise Aubrun, violist Alma Fernandez, cellist Cécilia Tsan and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert, who played Mason House’s Yamaha C-7 concert grand, with special German hammers to give a softer sound, ideal for chamber music.

What makes chamber music special is intimacy: the ability to hear the slightest change in how the players attack their instruments; how they navigate melodic passages that expand from one instrument to two, three or more, and fit their playing styles together. Chamber music is up close and personal. This concert was memorable in part because we in the audience could feel we were taking the journeys of these works along with each of the wonderful players, hearing nuances that would have been inaudible in a larger hall or outdoors.

Todd Mason.

It was the first Mason House concert of the spring, the kind of serene afternoon when one would expect to hear a piece like Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 1, the program’s planned opener, but to commemorate Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian invasion, the concert began with Mason’s new arrangement of its National Anthem, whose title, “Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia” translates to “The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished.” The anthem had the mournful yet proud sensibility suggested by those words, an anguish that Mason and the quartet conveyed nobly, given the powerful emotions this populist theme evokes today.

Mozart in 1782, three years
 before the composition
of his First Piano Quartet.

From a strictly musical perspective, the inclusion of this impactful piece at the top framed the concert as a study in contrasting emotions. To be sure, as David Brown’s fascinating introduction outlined, the concert was also a journey through the relatively unpopulated realm of the piano quartet, a rarer form than one might have guessed: the Mozart we heard was one of the first piano quartets to be published.

The Mozart performance exerted a steadying influence on audience emotions potentially inflamed by thoughts of war’s horrors. To be able to concentrate on musical details is therapeutic; like the string players’ bowing techniques and how they aligned them into one sound in unison passages, or the carefully modulated way in which Vanhauwaert would control his dynamics and presence within the ensemble.

Brown noted that contemporary audiences in 1785 were frustrated by this work’s “incomprehensible tintamarre of 4 instruments.” What I heard was delightfully comprehensible, and never dull. Mozart in his essence is the composer who presents his music as going in one direction—giving you every reason to think that’s where it’s going—and then plays beguiling games along the way to lead you to think something else might be happening, until you reach a point of surrendering any sense that you know where the piece was going—and then he takes you exactly where you expected in the first place, and you are grateful.

Alma Fernandez.

This quartet—a constant springtime cycling of sunshine, clouds and rain—also felt like a conversation between characters with such a close relationship they can finish each other’s thoughts. My scribbled notes are filled with laudatory comments on bowing, fingering, attacks on strings or keys: the touch of music, not just the sound. It felt brave of these musicians to allow us to hear so much of them, the miracle of their artistry being how the exposure only enhanced our enjoyment.

Mahler aged 18 in 1878, two
years after writing his Piano
Quartet Movement.

The next piece, Mahler’s Piano Quartet Movement in A Minor, pulled us back into the maelstrom of emotions initially aroused by reflecting on Ukraine, then expertly diverted into a haze of joy by Mozart. Mahler’s quartet is notable, as Brown explained, for being the only work of chamber music he wrote that was not lost or destroyed. Mahler was a teen when he wrote it, but it contains the seeds of what his mature compositions are most known for: emotional turmoil, veering from joy to misery.

This piece walked a narrower path, from grief to melancholy to a kind of fearfulness that invoked our collective wartime moment. The quartet leaned powerfully into these emotions, their faces reflecting the mournful mood. It was a gift from the musicians to the audience to allow us to understand the depth of Mahler’s pain, to enable a catharsis. It is also a very different usage of the tools of chamber music, including the space itself and the intimacy it affords.

Brahms in 1886, the year of the Third Piano Quartet.

The first half’s dialectics of chamber music and emotion reached a synthesis after the interval, with Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor. David Brown called it one of Brahms’ “major statements,” suggesting it is in the same class as other major statements from Brahms with which audiences are more familiar. If you have access to a music library, this quartet is worth seeking out for that reason; to make sure it is in your mind’s Brahms canon alongside the concerti and the symphonies. Whereas Mozart took classical structures and gently subverted them to his own imaginative ends, Brahms created structures that could carry everything he wanted to say, and made us believe that structure had been there forever.

Cécilia Tsan.

The quartet was up to the challenge, taking us everywhere Brahms wanted us to go, from the slowly awakening moments of the opening, to the light-as-a-cat touch on the fascinating, crowd-pleasing scherzo, to the heavenly cello-piano duet at the opening of the third movement, a gorgeous, complex meditation on the topic of deep emotion, as opposed to Mahler’s deep dive into emotion itself. This was mature reflection, with all four musicians rising to the needed rhetorical heights and guiding us to Brahms’ compassionate conclusion.

Ambroise Aubrun and Steven Vanhauwaert.

The fourth movement felt like, among other things, a showcase for the quartet’s virtuosity as well as for the players' mutual respect. Violinist Aubrun and pianist Vanhauwaert were spotlit early, with violist Fernandez and cellist Tsan added to the mix as the composer developed and discovered what he wanted to say in this finale.

In this final movement, I recall feeling as if Papa Brahms had pulled his punches a bit. The first three movements had teed me up for the kind of climactic resolution of his concert hall classics. But the fourth movement seemed more… polite? And so it was. This “major statement” was not a symphony or concerto, but chamber music. We don’t want to alarm anyone. We’re home.

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Mason Home Concert, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, 6:00 p.m., Saturday, April 9, 2022.

Images: The concert: Todd Mason; Mozart, Brahms: Wikimedia Commons; Mahler: Gustav Mahler website.

Mozart, Da Ponte and the War between the Classes

Sunny Martini

REVIEW: The Marriage of Figaro

McCaw Hall

ERICA MINER 

If Mozart had been asked which of his operas was the most perfect, he surely would have replied, “My Figaro.” Indeed, there is not a superfluous note or misplaced phrase in the brilliant work. The same holds true for his collaborator Da Ponte’s exquisite libretto. If ever an opera could be described as “easy listening” and flawlessly engaging, The Marriage of Figaro would qualify hands down.

 

Seattle Opera’s season-ending new Figaro production directed by SO perennial favorite Peter Kazaras makes the most of the composer and librettist’s combined genius to mount a rendering of the work that is at once savvy and nostalgic. Says Kazaras, “color-saturated costumes…a set that suggests things are not quite what they seem…a tantalizing backdrop for the tremendous talent of our fabulous performers.” That talent abounded in the opening night cast.

Baritone Ryan McKinny’s much anticipated SO debut as the cunning servant Figaro did not disappoint. Not only is he a consummate vocal artist with remarkable evenness throughout his entire range, he also is a gifted physical comedian with impeccable timing and his characterization was at once subtle and uproarious. With such impressive vocal splendor, one eagerly anticipates his appearance next season as Kurwenal in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Philip Newton

Equally skillful was Soraya Mafi’s portrayal of Figaro’s soulmate, Susanna. Last seen playing the child Flora (also directed by Kazaras) in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, Mafi displayed her maturity and onstage star power, playing Susanna as grown up, sophisticated, and ready to take on any challenge that comes her way. Her rendering of Act 4’s Deh vieni, sung with great beauty and tenderness, was a highlight of the evening, and much appreciated by the audience. 

The production was a true reflection of a dual protagonist subject at its core: The Marriage of Figaro meets the Wedding of Susanna. McKinny and Mafi melded perfectly in their equally skillful depictions of the couple of the hour and in their vocal adeptness, each nimbly playing off the other in every scene, culminating in a final reckoning between Mars and Venus that was both pleasing and impressive in its execution.

Making his SO debut as Count Almaviva, Texan baritone Norman Garrett was appropriately unsettling as the nobleman shamelessly trying to exercise his droit de seigneur and paying the price at the hands of women wilier than he. Vocally he was extraordinary: a lush voice that negotiated Almaviva’s wide range, from top to bottom, superbly. Dramatically, he cut a dashing if disturbingly virile figure who will stop at nothing to get his way—until the true power of women stops him in his tracks.

Finnish soprano Marjukka Tepponen as the Countess Almaviva, seen in the 2018 season as another Mozart heroine, Fiordiligi in Cosí fan tutte, was vocally and dramatically convincing in the ensembles and recitatives. In her two arias, however, there was a lack of sureness, especially in the high notes in the virtuoso tour-de-force, Dove sono.

Sunny Martini

Philip Newton

Rounding out the cast was a roster of excellent comprimari: Kevin Burdette (Bartolo), Margaret Gawrysiak (Marcellina), Martin Bakari (Basilio), Anthony Webb (Curzio), Ashley Fabian (Barbarina), and Barry Johnson (Antonio). Among these, Bakari’s Basilio stood out both comedically and vocally. Though the character has relatively little play, when he was active onstage he commanded attention with his riotous horseplay, as exaggerated as successful comedy can be, never failing to entertain.

Philip Newton

Burdette’s La vendetta was skillfully done, and his interactions with Gawrysiak’s Marcellina were fun-loving and touching.

Kazaras made the most of the ingenious opera’s comedic opportunities throughout the evening and captured the Rossini-like chaos and confusion of the act-ending ensembles with aplomb. As always, Kazaras excelled in the small touches that came off as waggish and witty yet subtle; e.g., Figaro’s playfully using the tape measure intended for the bed to measure Susanna. Kazaras also made the “Mother-Father” reveal in Act 3 equally funny and tender, especially between Burdette and Gawrysiak. 

Philip Newton

On the podium, debuting conductor Alevtina Ioffe’s initial impression in the overture was that of a young, energetic and adept chef d’orchestre, with a lively yet not overly hurried tempo. However, a few touches, such as the insistent use of the open “E” string in the violins (which would make any violinist cringe), were grating. And some of the tempi in other sections of the work were rushed, especially in the wedding scene, not allowing the chorus to effectively execute all of Mozart’s wonderful notes.

Belgian set designer Benoît Dugardyn displayed his background as an architect with striking sets for acts 2, 3, and 4 whose immense columns and sparkling chandelier gave a true impression of a wealthy noble seigneur’s palace. Connie Yun’s lighting complemented the sets seamlessly, at times matching the hues in the background with Myung Hee Cho’s exquisitely wrought costumes.

Wade Madsen choreographed a delightful wedding scene replete with Cho’s colorfully clad couples moving about charmingly, either restrained or unrestrained, depending on their station. The fandango clearly was well researched, performed with convincing Spanish panache (excuse the mixed metaphors) by each and every artist onstage.

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Photo credits: Philip Newton, Sunny Martini 

Erica can be reached at: [email protected]

Pepe Romero Returns to Long Beach

Pepe Romero and Eckart Preu discuss Sanlúcar's Medea before their performance
with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony at the Terrace Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center

DAVID J BROWN

Last Saturday evening’s program at the Long Beach Terrace Theater ended with as loud and long an ovation as I can recall there, hailing the performance by the Andalusian guitar virtuoso Pepe Romero, with the LBSO under Music Director Eckart Preu, of the Medea suite by Romero’s long-time friend, the flamenco composer and guitarist Manolo Sanlúcar (b. 1943).

Sanlúcar composed his orchestral ballet Medea in 1984 and though Romero averred, in his engaging pre-concert chat with the conductor, that the work has far more to do with the soul of flamenco and southern Spain than with ancient Greek myth, it would still be interesting to know how the ballet scenario treats the story of the wronged and vengeful queen of Corinth, and in particular how the six movements of the suite, arranged for guitar and orchestra in 2012 by Manuel Barrueco, relate to the original hour-long ballet.

Manolo Sanlúcar in 2013.

The suite itself is a substantial work, running well over half an hour in this performance, though Sanlúcar’s orchestral forces are economical: just double woodwind and two horns, strings (the LBSO fielding a strength of 8-6-4-4-3), timpani, and percussion—the score’s only lavish element, with a four-person line-up playing a wide variety of untuned instruments.

The brief Obertura (Overture) immediately unveils a landscape of bleak minor-key string textures over which a keening line rises and falls on the oboe (Rong-Huey Liu, Principal), to be abruptly interrupted by meditative guitar roulades. A sudden climax segues straight into the second movement, entitled Reencuentro Y Desencuentro (Reunion and Discord), with drums and tambourine leading a kind of threatening processional, and the guitar always present like an agitated spectator.

This cuts off abruptly, and then a long solo guitar introduction leads into the main body of the third movement, Seduccion (Seduction), in which oboe and strings sing a long and hauntingly nostalgic melody with at its heart a tender duet between the guitar and a solo cello (Cécilia Tsan, Principal). The percussion “continuo” returns to usher in the Conjuro (Incantation), its main theme repeated again and again in a hypnotic crescendo until it precipitates La Venganza, this penultimate movement being given onomatopoeic realism by irregular stabbing rhythms á la “Rite of Spring.”

The final movement is Fiesta, but for all its energy, driven again by the percussion and the guitar, the powerful and cumulative sense of menace and inescapable doom that imbues the work as a whole is anything but dissipated as it swirls to its emphatic end.

Due to Covid, this performance took place some three years later than intended, but it was the hugely successful outcome of what had been clearly a passion project for both soloist and conductor. The Medea suite deserves to become as popular as Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, to judge by the audience response, which only increased in fervor when Pepe Romero returned to the stage for an encore, Fantasia Cubana by his father, Celedonio Romero.

The first half of the program had inhabited a different musical universe, and Eckart Preu acknowledged in his pre-concert talk that the only linkage really was that all three works invoked some kind of musical “story-telling”: this being symphonic in the two pieces that occupied the first half.

The works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)—like those of his brother offspring of Johann Sebastian Bach as well as other contemporaries—have in the last half-century or thereabouts become so much the province of “period” or HIP (historically informed) performers in small venues that it was quite a novelty to hear one of his symphonies played by (relatively) large forces on modern instruments in a big hall like this.

Straddling the Baroque and Classical eras, C.P.E. Bach’s 20-or-so symphonies are all relatively small in scale, in three movements rather than four, and only his last set, written in 1775-76, add pairs of flutes, oboes, and horns to the strings (here at the same strength as used in Medea). Preu and the LBSO opened the concert with the third of these, the Symphony in F Major H. 665.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Despite the Terrace Theater’s somewhat cavernous acoustic, in the Allegro di molto first movement C.P.E.’s characteristic alternation of tuttis with quiet solo interjections from the winds retained its sharpness of contrast, and the hugeness of the space actually accentuated the strange, glacial passage of softly shifting string harmonies (played with very little vibrato) that cut off the first movement’s onward rush—remarkably C.P.E. does this without changing the tempo marking—in preparation for the brief, but equally spectral Larghetto.

The final Presto, with first half repeat present but not (I think) the second half, was suitably bustling, and the audience reaction was warmly respectful, if not hugely enthusiastic. If the inclusion of this type of work in an LBSO concert can be regarded as an experiment, then this was a qualified success.

Much less of an experiment in this context was Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D major Hob. I/104. Eighteen years C.P.E. Bachs’s junior, Haydn had, by the time C.P.E penned his last set, already written numerous symphonies—some of them considerably more ambitious in scale and structurally adventurous—and he was only a couple of years older than C.P.E. had then been when in 1795 he wrote this, his final masterpiece in the genre. (Another parallel between the two composers is that, having finally relinquished the symphonic genre, both went on in their old age to compose substantial quantities of choral music.)

Joseph Haydn.

The performance was notably energetic and committed, with Preu seeming to relish Haydn’s subtle and not-so-subtle musical jokes, as in the Andante (kept moving here) where the aging composer apparently pretends to lose his way, or nod off, only to jerk awake with a sudden fortissimo.

The third movement Menuetto went with an infectious “Viennese” lilt, and Preu made the first and last movements more in scale with each other than they sometimes are by the omission of the initial Adagio—Allegro’s exposition repeat, but then the inclusion of the comparable repeat in the final Allegro spiritoso. Haydn is still too often absent from concert halls compared with, say, Mozart and Beethoven. More please!

Eckart Preu introduces Haydn's Symphony No. 104.

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Saturday, April 30, 2022,
8 p.m.

Images: The performers: Caught in the Moment Photography; Sanlúcar, C.P.E. Bach, Haydn: Wikimedia Commons.

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